In this sacred book of family scandals we find filth, sex orgies, cannibalism, atrocities, sex perversions, incest, bloody violence unparalleled in any other chronicle in all the literature of the world. Fortunately, not one-third of the human family has ever heard of the Christian Bible; not one-tenth of the Christians have ever read it, and no two who have read it agree as to its meaning. Won’t you help get this book out of the hands of our children, out of decent homes, and out of hotel and motel rooms?|Frank C. Hughes
Is god willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?|Epicurus
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good|Thomas Paine
Remember your humanity, and forget the rest|Bertrand Russell
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked.|H. L. Mencken
Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.|Anonymous
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.|Samuel Butler
The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man's spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.|Tozer
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.|Delo McKown
Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition.|Paul Keller
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful|Lucius Amaeus Seneca
It is an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for a life after death. Even corporations, with all their reward systems, don't try to make it posthumous.|Gloria Steinem
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absented myself from Christian assemblies.|Benjamin Franklin
In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.|Heinrich Heine
Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.|Eleanor Roosevelt
Losing my faith was the most spiritual thing that ever happened to me.|Julia Sweeney
I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.|Bertrand Russell
I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.|W. C. Fields
First, prove to me objectively that there is a god, any god. Only then do we need to discuss which particular deistic religion, cult, sect, or denomination happens to have the minor details correct.|John Tyrrell
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably, some part of him is aware that they are myths, and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dares not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.|Bertrand Russell
Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.|Michel de Montaigne
The theory that you should always treat the religious convictions of other people with respect finds no support in the Gospels.|Arnold Lunn
Why has a religious turn of mind always a tendancy to narrow and harden the heart?|Robert Burns
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.|Nietzsche
If you talk to God, you're praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.|Thomas Szasz
Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power.|Salman Rushdie
History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.|Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.|Bertrand Russell
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.|George Bernard Shaw
I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it.|Joe Mullally
The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.|Ferdinand Magellan
I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.|Douglas Adams
I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell's ass.|Barry Goldwater
Civilization has come about by going to school more than to church.|Lemuel K. Washburn
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ’The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.|Bertrand Russell
As the days go by, we face the increasing inevitability that we are alone on a godless, uninhabited, hostile, and meaningless universe. Still... you've got to laugh, haven't you.|Holly (ship's computer on Red Dwarf)
Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.|Robert A. Heinlein
Over 10, 000 different religions. Over 35,000 different Christian denominations. They all can't be right. But they all could be wrong.|John Tyrrell
There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.|Blaise Pascal
We are all looking for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.|Lawrence Durrell
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.|Napoleon
Which is it: is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?|Nietzsche
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.|Susan Ertz
At first I wanted to be a missionary, then I met one.|Dr. T. Barry Brazelton
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.|Carl Sagan
It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.|Percy Bysshe Shelley
We may define faith as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of faith. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.|Bertrand Russell
The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.|Catholic Church's decision against Galileo
Where prayer, amulets and incantations work, it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief.|Hippocrates
He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect better than Christianity and end in loving himself better than all.|Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim. I do not accept the charge of apostasy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one cannot be said to have apostatized from. The Islam I know states clearly that there can be no coercion in matters of religion. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.|Salman Rushdie
Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.|Mircea Eliade
If wisdom and diamonds grew on the same tree we could soon tell how much men loved wisdom.|Lemuel K. Washburn
I had to set limits to knowledge in order to make place for faith.|Immanuel Kant
Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.|Butch Hancock
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, thank you, that would suffice.|Meister Eckhart
I am constantly asked: What can you, with your cold rationalism, offer to the seeker after salvation that is comparable to the cozy, home-like comfort of a fenced dogmatic creed? To this the answer is many-sided. In the first place, I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained by the abdication of reason. I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained from drink or drugs or amassing great wealth by swindling widows and orphans. It is not the happiness of the individual convert that concerns me; it is the happiness of mankind. If you genuinely desire the happiness of mankind, certain forms of ignoble personal happiness are not open to you. If your child is ill, and you are a conscientious parent, you accept medical diagnosis, however doubtful and discouraging; if you accept the cheerful opinion of a quack and your child consequently dies, you are not excused by the pleasantness of belief in the quack while it lasted.|Bertrand Russell
It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.|Mark Twain
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.|Jules Renard
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.|Joseph Conrad
It's unequvocally clear that life begins at birth and ends at death. And if most people on this planet understood that, they would lead their lives very differently. We always try to find religious or mysterious forces to fill in for our inadequacies, but heaven and hell are both here on earth every day, and we make our lives around them.|J Craig Venter
...it is with God we must be most careful: for He makes such a powerful appeal to what is lowest in human nature -- our feeling of insufficiency, fear of the unknown, personal failings; above all our monstrous egotism which sees in the martyr's crown an athletic prize which is really hard to attain.|Lawrence Durrell
I got no religion in me. I could never see through it. Basically, I'm a facts man; if I can't see through it, I say it's not possible.|J.R. Simplot
If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.|Morris Cohen
What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.|Bertrand Russell
Of the five most important things in life, health is first, education or knowledge is second, and wealth is third. I forget the other two.|Chuck Berry
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.|Ilka Chase
All progress depends on the unreasonable man.|George Bernard Shaw.
If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?|Robert G. Ingersoll
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion - i.e. none to speak of.|Lazarus Long (Robert Heinlein)
If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.|Marcus Aurelius
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.|Chapman Cohen
After coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.|Nietzsche
The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.|John Stuart Mill
If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking...the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.|Ayn Rand
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.|Stephen W. Hawking
What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.|Kurt Vonnegurt
Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion. Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.|Gary Zukav
The United States is not a Christian nation. It is a great nation with Christians, among others, in it. But our greatness is based on the fact that there is no official religion.|Senator Lowell Weicker
None of the great religions have done more than exclude; throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the urge they are intended to cure.|Lawrence Durrell
The true fanatic is a theocrat, someone who sees himself as acting on behalf of some superpersonal force: the Race, the Party, History, the proletariat, the Poor, and so on. These absolve him from evil, hence he may safely do anything in their service.|Lloyd Billingsley,
Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.|Albert Einstein
The trouble with born again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.|Herb Caen
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.|Thomas Paine
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.|George Bernard Shaw
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.|Kurt Vonnegut
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.|Albert Einstein
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error if error seduces them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master.; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.|Gustave Le Bon
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent--it says so right there on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.|Lazarus Long (Robert A Heinlein)
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law, it is administered with subhuman efficiency.|Eric Ambler
Mankind have banned the Divinity from their presence; they have relegated him to a sanctuary; the walls of the temple restrict his view; he does not exist outside of it.|Denis Diderot
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth.|H.L. Mencken
If primitive religion could be explained away as an intellectual aberration, as a mirage induced by emotional stress, or by its social function, it was implied that the higher religions could be discredited and disposed of in the same way.|E.E. Evans-Pritchard
Saints fly only in the eyes of their disciples.|Hindu proverb
Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.|Robert G. Ingersoll
Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking.|P.W. Atkins
America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here and abuse the Indians.|Frank Zappa
The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress.|Emmet F. Fields
There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.|Ruth Hermence Green
A moral principle is not a command to act or to forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, not by the rule as such.|John Dewey
I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.|Richard Feynman
Man's best friend is his dogma.|Timothy Leary
There is no place in a fanatic's head where reason can enter.|Napoleon Bonaparte
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.|Frederick Douglass
Well, it's like I always said, 'There's nothing an agnostic can't do if he really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not|. Monty Python
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.|Salman Rushdie
Only fraud and falsehood dread examination . Truth invites it .|Thomas Cooper
God is a lonely place without steak.|Charles Bukowski
Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.|Mark Twain
I resist all established beliefs. My religion basically is to be immediate, to live in the now.|Jack Nicholson
Mostly, we are good when it makes sense. A good society is one that makes sense of being good.|Ian McEwan
The world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.|Edwin Arlington Robinson
If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.|Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.|H.L. Mencken
Credulity is not a crime for the individual - but it is clearly a crime as regards the race. Just look at the actual consequences of credulity. For years men believed in the foul superstition of witchcraft and many poor people suffered for this foolish belief. There was a general belief in angels and demons, flying familiarly, yet skittishly through the air, and that belief caused untold distress and pain and tragedy. The most holy Catholic church (and, after it, the various Protestant sects) enforced the dogma that heresy was terribly sinful and punishable by death. Imagine - but all you need do is to recount - the suffering entailed by that belief. When one surveys the causes and consequences of credulity, it is apparent that this easy believer in the impossible, this readiness toward false and fanatical notions, has been indeed a most serious and major crime against humanity. The social life in any age, it may be said, is about what its extent of credulity guarantees. In an extremely credulous age, social life will be cruel and dark and treacherous. In a skeptical age, social life will be more humane.|E. Haldeman-Julius
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.|George Santayana
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.|Aldous Huxley
What has been the effect of religious coercion? To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.|Thomas Jefferson
All religions must be tolerated... for... every man must get to heaven his own way.|Frederick the Great
Religion of every kind involves the promise that the misery and futility of existence can be overcome or even transfigured. One might suppose that the possession of such a magnificent formula, combined with the tremendous assurance of a benevolent God, would make a person happy. But such appears not to be the case.: unease and insecurity and rage seem to keep up with blissful certainty, and even to outpace it.|Christopher Hitchens
I'm not normally a religious man, but if you're up there, save me, Superman!|Homer Simpson
Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.|Lawrence Durell
I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.|Salman Rushdie
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.|Lazurus Long (Robert A Heinlein)
The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance.|Frederick Douglass
Don't be afraid to face the facts, and never lose your ability to ask the questions: Why? and How?|Immanuel Velikovsky
Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.|Timothy Leary
My head hurts, my feet stink and I don't love Jesus.|Jimmy Buffett
I face reality and admit that not only isn't there anyone home upstairs - there isn't even any upstairs. I have one life and I intend to make the most of it. Therefore it follows naturally that if I firmly believe this, why then I cannot deprive another person of their turn at existence. Only the very self assured political and religious zealots kill people in order to save them|.Jim DiGriz aka The Stainless Steel Rat (Harry Harrison)
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.|Voltaire
A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.|Vique
The third major characteristic of God - infinitude - is the catchall, the universal modifier of Christian theology. God is not merely a being; he is infinite being. God is not merely good; he is infinite goodness. God is not merely wise; he is infinite wisdom. And so on down the list. God is exaggeration run amuck.|George H. Smith
By the age of fifteen, I had convinced myself that nobody could give a reasonable explanation of what he meant by the word 'God' and that it was therefore as meaningless to assert a belief as to assert a disbelief in God. Though this, in a general way, has remained my position ever since, I have always avoided unnecessarily to offend other people holding religious belief by displaying my lack of such belief, or even stating my lack of belief, if I was not challenged.|Friedrich August von Hayek
My reason taught me that I could not have made one of my own qualities - they were forced upon me by Nature; that my language, religion, and habits were forced upon me by Society; and that I was entirely the child of Nature and Society; that Nature gave the qualities and Society directed them. Thus was I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught by man.|     Robert Owen
The greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.|     Sir Herbert Butterfield
The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was saved, they were damned.... Our hymns were loaded with arrogance - self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come Judgment Day.|Robert Heinlein
In the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable.|Sigmund Freud
Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.|Bertrand Russell
Religious Displays, as distinct from religious beliefs, are submissive acts performed towards dominant individuals called gods. The acts themselves include various forms of body-lowering, such as kneeling, bowing, kowtowing, salaaming and prostrating; also chanting and rituals of debasement and sacrifice; the offering of gifts to the gods and the making of symbolic gestures of allegiance. The function of these actions is to appease the super-dominant beings and thereby obtains favours or avoid punishments. There is nothing unusual about this behaviour in itself. Subordinates throughout the animal world subject themselves to their most powerful companions in a similar way. But the strange feature of these human submissive actions, as we encounter them today, is that they are performed towards a dominant figure, or figures, who are never present in person. Instead they are represented by images and artifacts and operate entirely through agents called holy-men or priests. These middle-men enjoy a position of social influence and respect because some of the power of the gods rubs off on them. It is therefore extremely important to the holy-men to keep the worshippers permanently obedient to the super-dominant figures, and they do this in several ways. | Desmond Morris 
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here...|Richard Feynman
In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.|Napoleon Bonaparte
Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more|. Mark Twain
The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.|Aristotle
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.|William Blake
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain.| Friedrich von Schiller
It's very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.|Salman Rushdie
You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.|Timothy Leary
To be conscious you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.|Benjamin Disraeli
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not.|Eric Hoffer
The many instances of forged miracles, and prophecies, and supernatural events, which, in all ages, have either been detected by contrary evidence, or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvellous, and ought reasonably to begat a suspicion against all relations of this kind.|David Hume
Do unto others: How much deeper into religion do we need to go?|Jack Nicholson
Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.|Robert Green Ingersoll
Religion is a fashionable substitute for Belief.|Oscar Wilde
Organized religion is like organized crime; it preys on people's weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate.|Mike Hermann
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.|Imamu Amiri Baraka
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.|Isaac Asimov
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.|George Bernard Shaw
Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system.|Thomas Paine
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.|David Hume
Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error, it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.|Robert H Jackson
The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.|Napoleon Bonaparte
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.|Albert Einstein
Always do right. This will astonish some people and gratify the rest.|Mark Twain
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.|Salman Rushdie
Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.|Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)
The universe is an intelligence test.|Timothy Leary
It is better to know nothing than to know everything by halves.|Friedrich Nietzsche
It is very much better to know something about everything than to know all about something.|Blaise Pascal
If you are doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch GET IT IN WRITING. His word isn't worth sh*t - not with the good Lord telling him how to f*ck you on the deal.|William F Burroughs
People find happiness both in wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Contentment is no index of true worth.|Vauvenargues
How comforting and encouraging the make-believe of religion can be for the common man.|Kurt Vonnegut
If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.|Henry David Thoreau
Religion has the power to induce so much evil.|(Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum)|Lucretius
The pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.|Ward, William Arthur
I enjoy life far too much to waste another minute listening to someone preaching belief in the unbelievable.|John Tyrrell
I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.|Robert Ingersoll
A faith of convenience is a hollow faith.|Father Mulcahy (M*A*S*H)
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs.|Leo Tolstoy
The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first use of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... logic can be happily tossed out the window. | Stephen King
Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful.|Seneca
All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete personality of their intellectual powers.|Mikhail A. Bakunin
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.|Susan B. Anthony
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.|Stephen Roberts
True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.|Albert Einstein
To insist on a spiritual practice that served you in the past is to carry the raft on your back after you have crossed the river.|Buddha
I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me every day, and the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to 'God' are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.|George Carlin
As far as I'm concerned, fundamentalism, whether in the name of Allah or Jesus, represents two heads of the same beast.|Russell Scanlon
It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so.|Josh Billings
The more you know the less the better|. Billy Connolly
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?|John Adams
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.|George Orwell
A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.|Voltaire
The only thing that makes a text sacred is the number of people that believe it to be so. Subtract that belief, and the Good Book becomes no different than any other book.|Rick Groen
People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.|Dave Barry
Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity.|Barbara G. Walker
You can do some terrible things when you feel you have right on your side.|Brian Flanagan
The man who gets on his knees has not learned the right use of his legs.|Lemuel K. Washburn
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.|William Ralph Inge
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e., everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. |Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
here is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.|PJ O'Rourke
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.|Charles Bukowski
When you feel that you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrific things.|Brian Flanagan (a former member of the Weather Underground)
Religions change; beer and wine remain.|Hervey Allen
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.|Salman Rushdie
By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.|Ursula K. LeGuin (The Telling)
Whenever I hear someone's in touch with God, I head for the exit.|Arthur Miller
I don't know if God even exists, although I confess I find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty. In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollory of life.|Jon Krakauer
To say that God is an incorporeal substance, is to say in effect there is no God at all. What alleges he against it, but the School-divinity which I have already answered? Scripture he can bring none, because the word incorporeal is not found in Scripture.|Thomas Hobbes
It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God.|Robert Ingersoll
We must condemn Christianity, not Christians; strike the church, but spare the heart.|Lemuel K. Washburn
Marriage ceremony: an incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family.|O.C. Ogilvie
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.|Barbara Kingsolver
Any organization could profit from a 10-year-old member with enough strength of character to refuse to swear falsely.|New York Times on the Boy Scouts refusing membership to Mark Welsh, who would not sign a religious oath
The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.|Andrew Dickson White
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.|Robert A. Heinlein
It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.|Robert G. Ingersoll
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.|James Feibleman
But I was not, to use the theological phrase, receptive. The great obstacle to the influx of grace was my own perfect happiness, and it is well known that God takes no thought for the happy, any more than He does for birds and puppies, perhaps realizing they have no need of Him and mercifully letting them alone.|John Glassco
Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.|Napoleon Bonaparte
The greatest development in modern religion is not a religion at all - it's an attitude best described as apatheism,|Jonathan Rauch
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.|Oscar Wilde
Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself - that is my doctrine.|Thomas Paine
There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves|Eric Hoffer
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.|George Bernard Shaw
A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices. It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one's anger. The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life. When that Bible is challenged, or relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically.|Bishop John Shelby Spong
I'm a firm believer in God himself, but that's as far as I can go. I'm not any denomination. I'm not Catholic or Presbyterian or Baptist or Methodist or Jewish or Muslim. I'm none of those things. And I'm sure that's just fine with God.|Ray Charles
There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience.|Hartley Shawcross
The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.|Benjamin Disraeli
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.|George Orwell
Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.|Norman Douglas
I feel most ministers who claim they've heard God's voice are eating too much pizza before they go to bed at night, and it's really an intestinal disorder, not a revelation.|Jerry Falwell
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope.|P.J. O’Rourke
I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders.|Robert G. Ingersoll
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.|Voltaire
It has been fifty and six years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac.|Thomas Jefferson
Religion is a mere question of geography.|Edward Gibbon
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.|H.L. Mencken
If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.|Carl Sagan
Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.|Gore Vidal
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.|Milton Friedman
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.|Dresden James
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.|Albert Einstein
There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbours good. One person I must make good: myself.|Robert Louis Stevenson
One cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required to hold it.|George Orwell
I didn't know I had a quarrel with him.|Henry Thoreau on being asked, Have you made your peace with God?
The great mystery of the world is not the invisible, but the visible.|Oscar Wilde
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge even to ourselves that we've been so credulous.|Carl Sagan
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.|Dalai Lama
Common sense is no match for the voice of God.|Jon Krakauer
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.|Eric Hoffer
I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.|Clarence Darrow
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.|Buddha
Governments only keep their promises when they are forced to, or when it is to their advantage to do so.|Napoleon Bonaparte
Without cultural sanction, most or all our religious beliefs and rituals would fall into the domain of mental disturbance.|John F. Schumaker
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.|Susan Sontag
I don't believe in the afterlife. I don't believe there is a God. The whole thing is accidental.|Arthur Miller
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.|Jonathan Swift
Existence exists - and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.|Ayn Rand
Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.|Timothy Leary
The world is in need of less religion and more common sense.|Llewelyn Powys
If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.|Thomas Carlyle
The art of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.|Gloria Steinem
How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?|John W. Draper
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.|Eric Hoffer
God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.|Friedrich Neitzsche
I have found that 90 per cent of religious beliefs are based on madness.|Khudair Meeri
It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.|Helen Keller
Religion is not just ingongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.|Christopher Hitchens.
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.|Bertrand Russell
We are punished by our sins, not for them.|Elbert Hubbard
The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion, but rather to know it.|Andre Maurois
One has to do good for it to exist in the world.| Maria von Ebner-Eisenbach
People who rely most on God rely least on themselves.| Lemuel K. Washburn,
Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.| Friedrich Nietzsche
There are two things in the world that can never get together - religion and common sense|George W. Foote
Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.| , Sigmund Freud
A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.| Edward Gibbon,
God created sex. Priests created marriage.| Voltaire
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.| Aldous Huxley
A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the nonexistent.| Elbert Hubbard
It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.|Mark Twain
If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make believe.|Aldous Huxley
Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.|Mark Twain
Some things have to be believed to be seen.|Ralph Hodgson
Be not misled by reports or tradition or common opinion. Be not misled by proficiency in the scriptures, nor by speculation and conclusions, nor by attractive theories and favorite ideas, nor by impressions of personal merits (of the teacher) and not by the authority of some master. But rather, Kalamas, when you discern yourselves: these things are unprofitable, these things are blameworthy, these things are censured by the wise; these things, when performed and undertaken are conducive to misfortune and sorrow, indeed do you then reject them.... And when you discern yourselves: these things are profitable, these things are not blameworthy, these things are praised by the wise; these things, when performed and undertaken are conducive to good fortune and happiness, indeed do you then accept them.|Buddha
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.|John Lennon
No creed can be stretched to the size of truth; no church can be made as large as man.|  Lemuel K. Washburn
I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much less historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society - he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity.|Arthur Koestler
I see these two legendary men [Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson] as symbolic of the American dream. Their position atop a vast religious/cable television/Bad Hair empire shows the entire world that America truly is the Land of Opportunity®, where Narrow-Minded, Really Dumb Guys can, and regularly do, get to the top.|Ron Barber
A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.|Havelock Ellis
Faith is never identical with piety.|Karl Barth
Would you sing 'Krishna bless America' or pledge allegiance to 'One nation under Allah'? If not, would that make you unpatriotic?|Chris Lee
If all the evidence put forward for the authenticity of religious teachings originates in the past, it is natural to look round and see whether the present, about which it is easier to form judgements, may not also be able to furnish evidence of the sort. If by this means we could succeed in clearing even a single portion of the religious system from doubt, the whole of it would gain enormously in credibility.|Sigmund Freud
Religion is the highest vanity.|Friedrich Hebbel
Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.|Mark Twain
Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.|Larry Flynt
Suppose, however, that God did give this law to the Jews, and did tell them that whenever a man preached a heresy, or proposed to worship any other God that they should kill him; and suppose that afterward this same God took upon himself flesh, and came to this very chosen people and taught a different religion, and that thereupon the Jews crucified him; I ask you, did he not reap exactly what he had sown? What right would this god have to complain of a crucifixion suffered in accordance with his own command?|Robert G. Ingersoll
Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.| John Fowles 
Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.|Ambrose Bierce
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.| George Bernard Shaw
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.|Sigmund Freud
There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified educations is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An education that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must teach by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.|Richard Mitchell
Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.| Anatole France
No man ever yet tore down his altar and found a God behind it.|  Lemuel K. Washburn
Give the church a place in the Constitution, let her touch once more the sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all ages will turn to ashes on the lips of men.| Robert G. Ingersoll
It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science.|Charles Darwin
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent are full of doubt.|Bertrand Russell
I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.|John Waters
Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.|P.W. Atkins
Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.|Julian Huxley
The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.|Sydney Smith
This is terrible! Holy wars! Killing! They're just using religion as an excuse to be extremely crappy to each other.|Dave Lister (Red Dwarf)
Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man's life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very - how should I say it - dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.| Ayn Rand
For the church to say that abortion is not acceptable for a Catholic is fine. To say directly or indirectly that on something that is a church teaching that you must also vote according to that - that's not acceptable in a country based on the First Amendment.|Senator Patrick Leahy
The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.| Rudyard Kipling
At the heart of pseudoscience (and some religion also, New Age and Old) is the idea that wishing makes it so. How satisfying it would be, as in folklore and children's stories, to fulfill our heart's desire by wishing. How seductive this notion is, especially when compared with the hard work and good luck usually required to achieve our hopes.|Carl Sagan
I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.|  Thomas Henry Huxley 
Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance’; You would say, ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’; and that is really what a scientific person would say about the universe.|Bertrand Russell
Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.|Robert G. Ingersoll
Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.|Austin O'Malley
If I were asked for a one-sentence soundbite on religion, I would say I was against it.|Salman Rushdie
If there were no ministers and no priests, how long would there be any churches?|Lemuel K. Washburn
We have thousands of religions with 10,000 answers and none of them completely|agreeable. Ray Bradbury
God is a child who amuses himself, going from laughing to crying for no reason, each day reinventing the world to the chagrin of hair-splitters, pedants, and preachers, who try to teach God his job as Creator.|Elie Faure
Dateline Phnom Penh - 26 November 1994. A Texas evangelist fled Cambodia on Saturday after a mob, angry over his failure to perform faith-healing miracles, rioted outside his hotel. Only the arrival of 20 armed police on Friday night kept the crowd from storming the luxury Hotel Cambodiana, where the Rev. Mike Evans and his entourage were staying after arriving for a scheduled five-day visit here Wednesday. The preacher's appearance had been heralded on radio and television stations. Blind eyes will open, the paralyzed will walk, promised the promotional announcements. Thousands of Cambodians, including sick, blind and paralyzed people from remote areas, came to the capital to attend his meetings.|Associated Press
Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice.|Georges Bizet
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few|. Stendhal
A sober, devout man will interpret 'God's will' soberly and devoutly. A fanatic, with bloodshot mind, will interpret 'God's will' fanatically. Men of extreme, illogical views will interpret 'God's will' in eccentric fashion. Kindly, charitable, generous men will interpret 'God's will' according to their character.|E. Haldeman-Julius
Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.|Marquis de Sade
As set forth by theologians, the idea of God is an argument that assumes its own conclusions, and proves nothing.| Johann Most
When no one had answers they created God. Now we have most of them, and one day we will have all of them, rendering God useless.|Anonymous
The greatest threat presented by modern religion is the archaic morals system that an insidious minority of Christians including the Radical Right, Christian Coalition, the RIAA along with many other influences and organizations wish to incorporate into our secular law!|W.J. Wallace Jr.
The chief characteristic of the religion of science is that it works.|Isaac Asimov
When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them.|Frank Herbert, Dune
Since the masses of the people are inconsistent, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.|Polybius
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.|Frank Lloyd Wright
I don't believe in god because I don't believe in Mother Goose. |Clarence Darrow
The churches must learn humility as well as teach it.|George Bernard Shaw
Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity and formal education positively reinforces it|. Stephen Vizinczey
Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.|Bertrand Russell
It is a wry commentary on the value-system in the United States that one speaks there of teacher training and driver education.|Peter Hilton
People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.|Alfred North Whitehead.
Never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom, or absolutes.|Christopher Reeve
The evidence of history confirms and demonstrates that the status of women is inseparably tied to the status of a nation.|Qasim Amin
At 18, our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide.|F. Scott Fitzgerald
If this supposedly omniscient and perfect god really has a plan, why do people insist on praying to him to change the plan?|John Tyrrell
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.|Jean-Paul Sartre
There are more hypocrites in church than anyplace else.|Loretta Lynn
Our ideas are only intellectual instruments which we use to break into phenomena; we must change them when they have served their purpose, as we change a blunt lancet we have used long enough.|Claude Bernard
After a few days in hospital, I was thinking, Oh, gee - I raised in a church, Protestant upbringing which I'd rejected as an adult - I'm lying in bed thinking, Hmmm, maybe I ought to pray. They always say there are no atheists in a foxhole... and I thought, Here I am in a pretty good-sized foxhole... and I thought Naahhh. I wouldn't respect any God who would listen to me after I'd rejected him so vociferously.|Chuck Close
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.|Edgar Allen Poe
Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.|Jiddu Krishnamurti
As soon as you are willing to discard observational data because it conflicts with religion, you are giving up any hope of ever really understanding the universe. As soon as you pick religion as the touchstone of reality, then we have to start discussing how one can demonstrate the correctness of one religion over another when different religions disagree.|Wilson Heydt
When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned.|Robert Ingersoll
All great truths begin as blasphemies.|George Bernard Shaw
After the survivor of the Spanish conquest has told his life's story he is convicted by the Inquisition: He posted no brief in defense or mitigation of his offenses, and when he was most solemnly advised by the Court President of the dire consequences he faced if found guilty, Juan Damasceno volunteered only one comment: It will mean I do not go to the Christian heaven? He was told that that would indeed be the worst of his punishments: that he would most assuredly not go to Heaven. At which, his smile sent a thrill of horror through every soul of the Court.|Gary Jennings, Aztec
Religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.| Richard Dawkins 
Living in fear is not living at all.|Christopher Reeve
If you talk to God, you're praying. If God talks back, it's schizophrenia.|Phil Spector
Scepticism is the first step toward truth.|Denis Diderot
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.|Bertrand Russell
Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.|C.S. Lewis
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.|Charles Schultz
Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.|Ivan Turgenev
For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said, Think! The many have said, Believe!|Robert G. Ingersoll
History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment.|Lemuel K. Washburn
In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in God. I replied, 'I don't think so.' And then proceeded to wail on the theme, using material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of Arabs-vs-Jews, Catholics-vs-Protestants, Southern Baptists-vs-Everyone. I said I felt if 'God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them,' then we were God. And when Man in his most creative, his most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most God-like. The student said he would pray for my immortal soul. He also asked for my address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of God. I thanked him politely and told him I'd gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas.|Harlan Ellison
Sunday school: a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.|H.L. Mencken
Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.|Immanuel Kant
Seek only the truth; seek not The Truth.|John Tyrrell
[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room.|J.K. Galbraith
We must be greater than God, for we have to undo His injustice.|Jules Renard
I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.|Somerset Maugham
Woe to him who would ascribe to something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.|Johann von Goethe
From silly devotions and from sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us.|Saint Theresa of Avila
The pursuit of happiness belongs to us, but we must climb around or over the church to get to it.|Heywood Broun
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.|George Carlin
Reputation is what you are in the limelight; character is what you are in the dark. Many a man's reputation and character would not recognize each other if they met.|J Tudor Rees
There is a disposition on the part of institutions of whatever sort - governmental, health, educational, ecclesiastical - to devote much of their energy, not to original purposes, but to self-perpetuation and self-aggrandizement.|Antonio Gualtieri
When we make mistakes they call it evil. When God makes mistakes they call it Nature!|Jack Nicholson (in The Witches of Eastwick)
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.|Steve Eley
The greatest step forward in human evolution was made when society began to help the weak and the poor instead of oppressing and despising them.|Maria Montessori
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.|Bertrand Russell
It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.|Abraham Lincoln
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.|Thomas Paine
The only way they'll ever get me into church will be feet first.|Dwight D Eisenhower
Believing cannot tip the scales in making a historical judgment about whether something really happened. I can choose to believe that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, but my believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether or not he really did it. So also with the story of Jesus walking on the water: believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether he really did do it. Belief cannot be the basis for historical conclusion; it has no direct relevance.|Marcus J. Borg
One should not go into church if one wants to breathe pure air.|Friedrich Nietzsche
We are told in the Pentateuch, that god, the father of us all, gave thousands of maidens, after having killed their fathers, their mothers, and their brothers, to satisfy the brutal lusts of savage men. If there be a god, I pray him to write in his book, opposite my name, that I denied this lie for him.|Robert G. Ingersoll
Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books. |Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
The Bible has lost every major battle it has ever fought. The Bible was quoted to defend slavery and the bible lost. The Bible was quoted to keep women silent, and the Bible lost. And the Bible is being quoted to deny homosexuals their equal rights, and the Bible will lose.|Bishop John Shelby Spong.
People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.|Helen Keller
The Cross is a gibbet - rather an odd thing to make use of as a talisman against bad luck, if that is how we regard it. Or is it, instead, a cynical reminder that Virtue usually gets pilloried whenever it makes one of its occasional appearances in this world?|Denis Johnston
Reason commands us much more imperiously than a master. If we disobey a master we are unhappy, but if we defy reason we are fools.|Blaise Pascal
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence.... Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God.... Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith.... The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.|Ayn Rand
Men willingly believe what they wish.|Julius Caesar
I believe that all roads lead to the same place - and that is wherever all roads lead to.|Willie Nelson 
The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.|John Stuart Mill
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.|Bertrand Russell
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?| Woody Allen
The true man walks the earth as the stars walk the heavens, grandly obedient to those laws which are implanted in his nature.|Lemuel K. Washburn
The Bible takes much of its colour from whoever is reading it, and it provides a text to support almost every shade of opinion, however preposterous.|Robertson Davies
If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.|Alfonso the Wise
Theology: the study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas.|Anonymous
It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.|Robert G. Ingersoll
As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.|Voltaire
The gods play games with men as balls.|Titus Maccius Plautus
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. |Charles Darwin
Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.|Friedrich Nietzsche
But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.|Abraham Lincoln
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.|Peter de Vries
God is the big question mark. Heaven is the even bigger question mark. Death is just another question mark.|Emmylou Harris
If you love God, burn the church.|Jello Biafra
Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.|John Lennon
We are not accountable for the sins of Adam.|Robert G. Ingersoll
We must therefore ask ourselves: What sort of thing is it reasonable to believe without proof? I should reply: The facts of sense experience and the principles of mathematics and logic -- including the inductive logic employed in science.| Bertrand Russell 
Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are|God. Jean Rostand
God has always been hard on the poor.|Jean Paul Marat
It is easy to ask the ulimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones.|John Osborne
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That unalterable rule applies both to God and man.|John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood. Leslie Stephen
Whomsoever you follow, howsoever great, see to it that you follow the spirit of the master and not imitate him mechanically.|Mohandas Ghandi
Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.|J.B.S. Haldane
The good Lord never gives you more than you can handle. Unless you die of something.|Richard Guindon
Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope.|Robert G. Ingersoll
We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.|A.N. Wilson
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.|Isaac Asimov 
A believer is a bird in a cage, a free-thinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.|Robert G. Ingersoll
Religion to me is much like the story The Pit and the Pendulum, every time the blade of religious censorship swings it comes closer and closer to severing freedom from the people.|W.J. Wallace Jr.
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.|J. Robert Oppenheimer
If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said no.|Margaret Stevie Smith
The truths which God revealed have been overthrown by the truths which man has discovered.|Lemuel K. Washburn
I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.|Heinz Pagels
The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.|Elbert Hubbard
People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.|Brooks Atkinson
Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends. There are some things we don't want to know. Important things.| Ned Flanders (The Simpsons)
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing - 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. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.|Bertrand Russell
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.|Walter Lippmann
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.|Alfred North Whitehead
We must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.|Sam Levenson
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.|Oliver Wendell Holmes
Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.|Robert G. Ingersoll
Science is the record of dead religions.|Oscar Wilde
God cannot be put into the national Constitution without putting liberty out of it.|Lemuel K. Washburn
The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion - except for the sect that can win political power.|Robert Houghwout Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court justice
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.|Charles Darwin
So many Christians long for integration of church and state because they know it would be a Christian influence on government and politics. But would they still want religion's interference in the state if that religion were Buddhism or some other belief system that differed from their own? If the government were run by Muslim tenets, they'd be crying out for separation of church and state.|Anonymous
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.|Bertrand Russell
The greatest achievement ever made in the cause of human progress is the total and final separation of church and state. If we have nothing else to boast of, we could lay claim with justice that the first among the nations we of this country made it an article of organic law that the relations between man and his maker were a private concern, into which other men have no right to intrude. To measure the stride thus made for the Emancipation of the race, we have only to look back over the centuries that have gone before us, and recall the dreadful persecutions in the name of religion that have filled the world.|David Dudley Field
It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon that book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.|Robert G. Ingersoll
In addition, the New York Supreme Court, in a well known case (Miami Military Institute v. Leff 129 Misc. 481, 220 N.Y.S. 799, 810) said of the principle of religious freedom that it, 'has always been regarded by the American people as the very heart of its national life.' This would be difficult to maintain in a democracy without institutional separation of church and state.|Anson Phelps Stokes
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.|George Orwell
Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief - or even of disbelief - in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel, mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house.|Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court justice
The government of the United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion. The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.|U.S. Treaty with Tripoli
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute - where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote - where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference - and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.|John F. Kennedy
To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals.| Don Schrader
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!|George Bernard Shaw
The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the... passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.|Bertrand Russell
The church doctrines of obedience to authority, repentance, fear of punishment, self-abnegation, acceptance of outer direction rather than inner assurance, elevation of faith over reason, and intolerance make institutionalized religion an ideal instrument of social constraint.|Madalyn O'Hair
The myths about Hades and the gods, though they are pure invention, help to make men virtuous.|Diodorus Siculus
When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one's consciousness — and one's mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.|Ayn Rand
My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.|Albert Einstein
The chicken probably came before the egg because it is hard to imagine God wanting to sit on an egg for 21 days.|Anonymous
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.|Thomas Paine
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.|Pearl S. Buck
I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.|Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.|Abraham Lincoln
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.|Thomas Jefferson
During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.| James Madison
Since evolution became fashionable, the glorification of Man has taken a new form. We are told that evolution has been guided by one great Purpose: through the millions of years when there were only slime, or trilobites, throughout the ages of dinosaurs and giant ferns, of bees and wild flowers, God was preparing the Great Climax. At last, in the fullness of time, He produced Man, including such specimens as Nero and Caligula, Hitler and Mussolini, whose transcendent glory justified the long, painful process. For my part, I find even eternal damnation less incredible, certainly less ridiculous, than this lame and impotent conclusion which we are asked to admire as the supreme effort of Omnipotence|. Bertrand Russell
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.|Kingsley Amis
Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century, the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms . . . movie stars to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!|Leon Trotsky
If God kills, lies, cheats, discriminates, and otherwise behaves in a manner that puts the Mafia to shame, that's okay, he's God. He can do whatever he wants. Anyone who adheres to this philosophy has had his sense of morality, decency, justice and humaneness warped beyond recognition by the very book that is supposedly preaching the opposite.|Dennis McKinsey
Religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more|.Sigmund Freud
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable . . . A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.| H.L. Mencken
The alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind.|Ayn Rand
Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm. At any rate, they hold this about the Communist faith. What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define 'faith' as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of 'faith'. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.|Bertrand Russell
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.|Gene Roddenberry
The whole thing (religious belief) is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude toward humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.|Sigmund Freud
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane|Robert G. Ingersoll
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.|Mark Twain
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.|Thomas Paine
All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligation to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its God to be truthful and understandable in his communications.|Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Fanaticism is . . . overcompensation for doubt.|Robertson Davies
If Christ had died in the 20th Century, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks.|Lenny Bruce
Here's another question I've been pondering: What is all this shit about angels? Have you heard this? Three out of four people believe in angels. Are you f...... stupid? Has everybody lost their minds? You know what I think it is? I think it's a massive, collective, psychotic chemical flashback for all the drugs smoked, swallowed, shot, and absorbed rectally by all Americans from 1960 to 1990. Thirty years of street drugs will get you some f...... angels, my friend!|George Carlin
One occasion for the theological intervention to prevent the mitigation of human suffering was the discovery of anaesthetics. Simpson, in 1847, recommended their use in childbirth, and was immediately reminded by the clergy that God said to Eve: 'In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.' And how could she sorrow if she were under the influence of chloroform? Simpson succeeded in proving that there was no harm in giving anaesthetics to men, because God put Adam into a deep sleep when He extracted his rib. But male ecclesiastics remained unconvinced as regards the sufferings of women, at any rate in childbirth.|Bertrand Russell
Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.|Nathaniel Brandon
I have not met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.|James Buchanan
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.|Richard Dawkins
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.|Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter . . . than you and I; and religion . . . is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.|Edgar Allan Poe
Opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion to what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seeds of religion.|Thomas Hobbes
Religion is in the interest of churches That sell in other worlds in this to purchase.|Samuel Butler
All fanaticism is a strategy to prevent doubt from becoming conscious.|Henry A. Williams
If there's a supreme being, he's crazy.|Marlene Dietrich
I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, heretic, or an unbeliever.|Daniel Boorstin
I don't believe in God, but I'm very interested in her.|Arthur C. Clarke
Despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence, and despite the doubts of Biblical scholars, America is so pious that not only do 91 percent of Christians says they believe in the Virgin Birth, but so do an astonishing 47 percent of U.S. non-Christians.|Nicholas D. Kristof
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.|Mark Twain
It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws. The power you acquire in this way is much greater and more reliable than that formerly supposed to be acquired by prayer, because you never could tell whether your prayer would be favorably heard in heaven. The power of prayer, moreover, had recognized limits; it would have been impious to ask too much. But the power of science has no known limits. We were told that faith could remove mountains, but no one believed it; we are now told that the atomic bomb can remove mountains, and everyone believes it.|Bertrand Russell
A fanatic is a man who does what the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.|Finley Peter Dunne
Christ was only crucified once, and for a few hours. Think of the thousands he has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.|Samuel Butler
Hell is paved with Good Samaritans.|William M. Holden.
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.|Denis Diderot
There is no cure for life and death save to enjoy the interval.|George Santayana
I'm astounded by people who want to know the universe when it's hard enough to find your way about Chinatown.|Woody Allen
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.| Paul Valery
Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world, and you will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men's dreams.|David Hume
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are consequences.|Robert G. Ingersoll
God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.|Samuel Butler
I say if you're going to go for the Angel bullshit, you might as well go for the Zombie package as well.|George Carlin
Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?|Jules Feiffer
Why, then, eternal punishment for the temporary offenses of so frail a creature as man?|David Hume
Faith is believing what you know ain't so.|Mark Twain
The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray.|Robert G. Ingersoll
The Christian religion was not only the first attended by miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.|David Hume
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in ours one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.|Thomas Jefferson
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning|Voltaire
Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel|Arabian Proverb
History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.|Baron de Montesquieu
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.|Ovid
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.|Immanuel Kant
A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in times of trouble.|Adlai Stevenson
The minister must take his pious grasp off of the throat of Sunday.|Lemuel K. Washburn
The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was... accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on Earth.|Friedrich Nietzsche
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.|Thomas Jefferson
I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.|Mark Twain
In America, sex is an obsession. In other parts of the world, it's a fact.|Marlene Dietrich
Because I'm Jewish, a lot of people ask why I killed Christ. What can I say? It was an accident. It was one of those parties that got out of hand. I killed him because he wouldn't become a doctor.|Lenny Bruce
The gods too, are fond of a joke.|Aristotle
Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.|Immanuel Kant
The only thing that keeps god from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.|Nicolas Chamfort
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.|Derek Bok 
If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.|Baron de Montesquieu
I am also mindful that man should never try to put words into God's mouth. I mean, we should never ascribe natural disasters or anything else to God.|George W. Bush
If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.|Mordecai Richler
The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.|Denis Diderot
I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.|Dick Gregory
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.|Bertrand Russell
I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.|George Carlin
There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.| Mark Twain
Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.|Voltaire
If there be a soul, it is as mortal as the body.|David Hume
Once you have denied the principles of science and cast doubt upon the most evident things, everyone knows you may prove whatever you will, and maintain any paradox.|Rosalie Colie
Many men would have arrived at wisdom had they not believed themselves to have arrived there already.|Seneca the Younger
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.|Arthur C. Clarke
I believe Dr. Kevorkian is onto something. I think he's great. Because suicide is our way of saying to God, "You can't fire me. I quit."|Bill Mahar
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.|Benjamin Franklin
If God lived on Earth, people would break his windows.|Jewish proverb
Vain are the thousand creeds that move men's hearts, unutterably vain, worthless as wither'd weeds.|Emily Bronte
Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.|Sigmund Freud
I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul.... No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life -- our desire to go on living -- our dread of coming to an end.|Thomas Edison
No gods, no masters.|Margaret Sanger 
I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.."|Denis Diderot
To be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.|Eric Hoffer
No kingdom has ever suffered as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.|Baron de Montesquieu
It is easier to dream up a system than to work out a theory.|Georges-Louis Leclerc
Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanacticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.|Voltaire
Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.|George Carlin
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.|Alfred North Whitehead
"In God We Trust." It is the choicest compliment that has ever been paid us, and the most gratifying to our feelings. It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always sounds well -- "In God We Trust." I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.|Mark Twain
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.|Arthur C. Clarke
Churchmen are interested in keeping the people ignorant.I call piety a malady of the heart.|Baron de Montesquieu
Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. But what shall we substitute in it's place? you say. What? A ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my relatives. I tell you to rid yourselves of this beast, and you ask me what you shall put in it's place?|Voltaire
Who says life is sacred - God? Hey, if you read your history, god is one of the leading causes of death.|George Carlin
I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe.|William Howard Taft
Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.|Marlene Dietrich
As a scientist, I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation.... I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then I will believe. Until then, no.|Luther Burbank
If God wanted sex to be fun, he wouldn't have invented children as punishment.|Ed Bluestone
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."|Mark Twain
My own view of 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.| Bertrand Russell
A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.|Jean de La Bruyere 
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.|Arthur C. Clarke
To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege.|Leo Tolstoy
I believe that the future of mankind lies in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth through science is the divine ideal to which man should aspire. I believe that all is illusion and vanity which is not among the treasures of verifiable truth that must slowly be acquired. I believe that the sum of those truths which are bound to increase continually will eventually give man incalculable power and equinamity, if not happiness.|Emil Zola
One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat.|Mark Twain
Political or religious dissenters are the plague of every totalitarian regime.|William O Douglas
By the year 2000, we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.|Gloria Steinem
If they chased every man or woman out of this town who has shacked up with someone else or got drunk, there wouldn't be any government left in Washington.| Barry Goldwater
TV evangelists say they don't favor any particular denomination, but I think we've all seen their eyes light up at tens and twenties.|Dennis Miller
As to the gods, I have no way of knowing either that they exist or do not exist, or what they are like. |Protagoras
I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.| Charles Lamb
Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense.|Mark Twain
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.|Lily Tomlin
The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people|Benito Mussolini
Most of my friends are not Christians, but I have some who are Anglicans or Roman Catholics.|Dame Rose Macauley
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.|H.L. Mencken
Popular religion may be summed up as a respect for ecclesiastics.|Baruch Spinoza
I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.|William O Douglas
Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.|John Adams
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.|Isaac Asimov
I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.|Mark Twain 
Is intelligence a liability nowadays? I think we can answer that with one word: Duh.|Dennis Miller
The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.|Armand Salacrou
I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.|Mikhail Bakunin
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.|Richard Dawkins
There is nothing more impressive than a miracle, except the credulity that can take it at par.| Mark Twain
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.|Bertrand Russell
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. 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 blindfolded fear.|Thomas Jefferson
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.| Karl Marx
This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.| Robert Ingersoll
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.|Sigmund Freud
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.... This is a somewhat new kind of religion.|Albert Einstein
Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.|Richard Dawkins
If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?|Justin Brown
God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New -- the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.|Mark Twain
The existentialist... thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoievsky said, ‘If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.’ That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.|Jean-Paul Sartre
The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.|Huang Po
In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow creatures.|John Stuart Mill
Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with these phantoms.|Robert Ingersoll
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.|William K Clifford
It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.|Ludwig Feuerbach 
To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or animal.|P. J. O'Rourke
There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.|H. G. Wells
Miss Erickson looked even more peculiar this morning. Is her spiritualism getting worse?|Noel Coward
There can be no incompatibility between the Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat earth in order to defend our religious faith.|Jimmy Carter
Adam was but human--this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.|Mark Twain
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.|Benjamin Franklin
After the Rapture, can I have your car?|seen on a bumpersticker
Evidence carefully sifted can be enlisted to support practically any supposition as long as the preponderance of contrary clues are ignored and the rules of sound scientific practice are suspended.|Dennis R. Trumble
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.|Richard Dawkins
I have no special regard for Satan; but, I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. We have none but the evidence for the prosecution, and yet we have rendered the verdict. To my mind, this is irregular.|Mark Twain
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.|David Hume
The world is proof that God is a committee.|Bob Stokes
Hands that help are far better than lips that pray.|Robert Ingersoll
Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age, he would have repudiated his doctrine.|Friedrich Nietzsche
True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.|Mark Twain
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.|Karl Marx
When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic|Lily Tomlin
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.|Christopher Morley
The myriad approaches adopted by creation "scientists" in their attempts to undermine evolutionary theory are indeed quite creative, but hardly scientific.|Dennis R. Trumble
The spirit of wrath -- not the words -- is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.|Mark Twain
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.|Richard Dawkins
Why attack God? He may be as miserable as we are.|Erik Satie
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know, that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they really change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. It happens every day, but i cannot recall the last time that happened in politics or religion.|Carl Sagan
We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.|W. H. Auden
What is absurd is not the teachings of the founders of religion, it's what followers subsequently make of it.|John Cleese
How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation?|Joseph Heller (Catch 22)
It is not best to use our morals weekdays, it gets them out of repair for Sunday.|Mark Twain
In six days the Lord created the heavens and the Earth and all the wonders therein. There are some of us who feel He might just have taken a little more time.|Kinky Friedman
It's not the world that has got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.|G.K. Chesterton
What people do behind closed doors is certainly not my concern unless I'm there with them.|Dolly Parton
Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.|Lenny Bruce
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O, Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.|Voltaire
What you cannot enforce, do not command.|Sophocles
I don't know. I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference.|Jack Kerouac
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.|Hypatia
The ethical argument regarding abortion hinges on the question of when life begins. Some believe life begins at forty.|Kevin Nealon
To know that we know what we know and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.|Copernicus
What God lacks is convictions -- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something -- not try to be everything.|Mark Twain
The universe is neither benign nor hostile - merely indifferent.|Carl Sagan
It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.|Aeschylus
God is dead, but forty thousand social workers have risen to take his place.|J. D. McCaughey
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our beliefs?|Carl Sagan
There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be an answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.|Gertrude Stein
The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the Tree of Knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your f**king mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions|Frank Zappa
What is there to do in life but find what you're good for and do it the best you can?|Anthony Boucher (Q.U.R.)
Man was predestined to have free will.|Hal Lee Luyah
Pleasure is by no means an infallible guide, but it is the least fallible.|W. H. Auden
The point which I would first understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the gods.|Socrates
If an entirely new scientific theory with more explanatory power is formulated, then Neo-Darwinism will have to be swept aside just as Lamarckism was. Creationism and Intelligent Design don't qualify as competing scientific theories because they're not scientific. They don't offer natural explanations for biological phenomena, but rather supernatural explanations which cannot be tested scientifically. Neo-Darwinism offers a natural explanation to account for the facts of evolution, and rejects supernatural explanations.|Charles Sullivan and Cameron Mcpherson Smith
The biggest conspiracy has always been the fact that there is no conspiracy. Nobody's out to get you. Nobody cares whether you live or die. There, you feel better now?|Dennis Miller
God's noblest work? Man. Who found it out? Man.| Mark Twain
I am a fortunate man. Whenever I make a mistake, other people are sure to notice it.|Confucius
Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.|Sam Harris
It is a bad plan that cannot be changed.|Publilius Syrus
Of all the sexual aberrations, the most peculiar is chastity.|Remy de Gourmont
The Vatican is against surrogate mothers. Good thing they did not have that rule when Jesus was born.|Elayne Boosler
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.|Socrates
Do television evangelists do more than lay people?|Stanley Ralph Ross
We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.|Aristotle
All gods are better than their conduct. | Mark Twain
Scientific creationism may be poor science, but it is powerful politics. And politically, it may succeed. | Laurie Godfrey
Scientists believe in proof without certainty: most people believe in certainty without proof. |  Ashley Montagu
He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. |  George Bernard Shaw
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being ruled by those who are dumber. | Plato
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing. |   HL Mencken
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses. | Sigmund Freud
Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask if God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God. |  JBS Haldane
Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection. | Henri Poincare
The gift of truth excels all other gifts. | Buddha
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. |  Abraham Lincoln
I want you to have all the academic freedom you want as long as you wind up saying the bible account (of creation) is true and all others are not. | Jerry Falwell
You are not able even to serve man. How can you serve the spirits?  You do not even understand even life. How can you understand death? | Confucious
The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be thankful for our blessings. | Garret Hardin
We're all worm bait waiting to happen. It's what you do while you wait that matters. | Kinky Friedman
Creationists use facts the same way a drunk uses a lightpost: for support instead of illumination. | Robert G Ingersoll
Astrology is Taurus. | F. W. Dedering
It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known; but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge; it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. | Charles Darwin
However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at their scientific and philosophical points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had. It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for - of even against - evolution, march in the army of the night, their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason. | Isaac Asimov
Writers always sound insufferably smug when they sit back and assert that their job is only to ask questions and not to answer them. But, in good part, it is true. And once you become committed to one particular answer, your freedom to ask new questions is seriously impaired. | David Hare 
You don't protect any of your individual liberties by lying down and going to sleep. |  John Scopes
God's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. | Mark Twain
The main conclusion arrived at in my work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. | Charles Darwin
If the Bible and the microscope do not agee, the microscope is wrong. | William Jennings Bryan
Look friends, the only possible way to enjoy life is not to be afraid to die. A zest for living requires a willingness to die, you cannot have the first without the second. | Robert A. Heinlein
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? | Albert Einstein
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.| Galileo Galilei
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question. | Stephen Jay Gould
One always begins with the simple, then comes the complex, and by superior enlightenment one often reverts in the end to the simple. Such is the course of human intelligence. | Voltaire
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them. | Mark Twain
A danger sign of the lapse from true skepticism into dogmatism is an inability to respect those who disagree. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. | Alfred North Whitehead
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation. | Herbert Spencer
We have long since lost the true names of things. It is precisely because squandering the goods of others is called generosity and recklessness in wrongdoing is called courage, that the republic is reduced to ruins. | Cato the Younger
As long as we do science, some things will always remain unexplained. | Fritjof Capra
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand. | Frank Herbert
Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind. | Francis Bacon
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. | F. Scott Fitzgerald
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. | Aristotle
Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it --and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting. | Carlo Rubbia
It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover. | Henri Poincare
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands. | Daniel Boorstin
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. | Mark Twain
All of our religions but the Judaic and the Greek think more of us dead than alive. | Joseph Heller
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. | Albert Einstein
If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called education. This last is peculiarly dastardly since it takes advantage of the defenselessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in a greater or less degree in the schools of every civilized country. | Bertrand Russell
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. | Max Planck
We must believe in free will. We have no choice. | Isaac B. Singer
The common idea that scientists reject a theory as soon as it leads to a contradiction is just not so. When they get something that works at all they plunge ahead with it and ignore its weak spots... scientists are just as bad as the rest of the public in following fads and being influenced by mass enthusiasm. | Vannevar Bush
It is impossible for a man to begin to learn what he thinks he knows. | Epictetus
School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. | Ivan Illich
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid. | James D. Watson
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are that good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. | Howard Aiken
One person's blasphemy is another's orthodoxy. One person's orthodoxy is another's blasphemy. | John Tyrrell
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. | William James
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think they'll hate you. | Don Marquis
The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party. | John Keats
Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by stupidity. | Robert A Heinlein
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. |   Napoleon Bonaparte
A witty saying proves nothing. | Voltaire 
From men motivated by moral certitude, history teaches, no lasting good ever comes. | Joseph Heller
It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. | Carl Sagan
The cross everywhere is a dagger in the heart of liberty. | Lemuel K Washburn
There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough. | William James
Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us. | Michael Oakeshott
Co-operation, like other difficult things, can be learned only by practice: and to be capable of it in great things, a people must be gradually trained to it in small. Now the whole course of advancing civilization is a series of such training. | John Stuart Mill
Age doesn't always bring wisdom, but it certainly makes it easier to fake. | Matthew McLachlan
It is not altogether true that persuasion is one thing and force is another. Many forms of persuasion, even many of which everybody approves, are really a kind of force. Consider what we do to our children. We do not say to them: Some people think the earth is round, and others think it flat; when you grow up, you can, if you like, examine the evidence and form your own conclusion. Instead of this we say: The earth is round. By the time our children are old enough to examine the evidence, our propaganda has closed their minds, and the most persuasive arguments of the Flat Earth Society make no impression. The same applies to the moral precepts that we consider really important, such as don't pick your nose or don't eat peas with a knife., There may, for ought I know, be admirable reasons for eating peas with a knife, but the hypnotic effect of early persuasion has made me completely incapable of appreciating them. | Bertrand Russell
History has shown us that we have good people who do good things, and we have evil people who do evil things, but to get a good person to do evil things takes religion. | Tony Matthews
We all do no end of feeling and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. | Mark Twain
Orgel's Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are. | Francis Crick
The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles. | JBS Haldane
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. | Albert Einstein
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. | Richard P. Feynman
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. | Chinese Proverb
There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds. | Alfred Tennyson
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought. | Albert Szent-Gyoergi
The world is continuous flux and is impermanent. | Buddha
Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind. | Isaac Asimov
A cult is a religion with no political power. | Thomas Jefferson 
In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain. | Pliny the Elder
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. | Ursula K. LeGuin
Ridding oneself of this feeling that the universe has a personal grudge against one is the first and most difficult task in growing to adulthood |Colin Wilson
If I were going to construct a God I would furnish him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present One lacks... He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy. | Mark Twain
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. | Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence was to amount to a licence to kill the offender, well the world would be sadly underpopulated of novelists, columnists, bloggers, and the writers of editorials. | Rex Murphy
I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practise whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent. | Arthur C. Clarke
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. | Eric Hoffer
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. | Aldous Huxley
If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out. | Rabindranath Tagore
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. | Confucius
A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom... and the other twenty percent isn't very important. | Robert A. Heinlein
The date of the creation of the world (according to the orthodox view) can be inferred from the genealogies in Genesis, which tell how old each patriarch was when his oldest son was born. Some margin of controversy was permissible, owing to certain ambiguities and to differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text; but in the end Protestant Christendom generally accepted the date 4004 B.C., fixed by Archbishop Usher.  Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who accepted this date for the Creation, thought that a careful study of Genesis made even greater precision possible; the creation of man, according to him, took place at 9.00 A.M. on October 23rd. This, however, has never been an article of faith; you might believe, without risk of heresy, that Adam and Eve came into existence on October 16th or October 30th, provided your reasons were derived from Genesis. The day of the week was, of course, known to have been Friday, since God rested on the Saturday. | Bertrand Russell
Wisdom outweighs any wealth. | Sophocles
Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired. | Titus Maccius Plautus
A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top | Unknown
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. | William Saroyan
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. | William Shakespeare
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. | George Santayana
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. | Matthew Arnold
from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. |  Mark Twain
Don't bury the life you have been given in this world in fantasies of the next; don't betray yourself with impossible dreams. |  David Horowitz
Now please state the scientific theory of creationism.  | Dr. Pepper
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources. |  Carl Sagan
Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible. |  Aristotle
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. |  Isaac Asimov
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.  | Virgil
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature. |  Jacob Bronowski
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. |  Edith Sitwell
Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. |  Wally 'Famous' Amos
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. | Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Such evil deeds could religion prompt. | Jane Austen
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. | Peter Ustinov
Agnosticism is not properly described as a negative creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. | Thomas Henry Huxley