For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan


If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

Frank Zappa


A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; 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


Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?

Arthur C. Clarke


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


I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God
who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Galileo Galilei


I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Christopher Marlowe


Suppose we've chosen the wrong god.
Every time we go to church we're just making him madder and madder.

Homer Simpson

"It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead."

"I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world."

Robert G. Ingersoll

Unusual but not wholly inappropriate choice - it's part of a soliloquy from The Jew of Malta, where Barabas explains his perspective and what he does -

"As for myself, I walk abroad ’a nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls.
Sometimes I go about and poison wells...
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon the Italian.
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in use
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells …
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, coz’ning, forfeiting,
I fill’d the jails with bankrupts in a year …"

But the general milieu in which all this takes place makes it clear that neither Christianity nor Islam has anything better to offer.

Not all from atheists but my favorite atheistic quotes.


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

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. - Mark Twain the bible

Accustom a people to believe that priests and clergy can forgive sins ... and you will have sins in abundance. I would not dare to dishonor my Creator's name by [attaching] it to this filthy book [the Bible]. - Thomas Paine

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion. - Abraham Lincoln

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. - Benjamin Franklin

When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. - Sinclair Lewis.

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

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. - Napoleon Bonaparte

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't. - Jules Renard

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

A la Kurt Vonnegut I should attribute this to Collins Concise Gem of Everyday Quotations, but apparently some bloke called Denis Diderot was involved...

its not a quote by an atheist, but i love when Bush said he knew he could trust Putin, because the man wore a cross. that should drive people to atheism.

I do not have cites for these, and for that I greatly apologize to the authors, but I've collected them over the years, and they are all AMAZING:

Take your time, and read them all:


"He who cannot reason is defenseless; he who fears to reason has a cowardly mind; he who will not reason is willing to be deceived and will deceive all who listen to him."

"I have found the average skeptic to have a much broader knowledge of the Bible and theological issues than the average Christian. Whether led to skepticism by knowledge or led to the knowledge by their skepticism, the truth of the skeptic is that he is ultimately led by a search for truth."

The information age offers very little for Bible fundamentalists to be optimistic about.

No position is worth the shameful compromise of one's intellectual integrity that belief in the biblical inerrancy doctrine requires. In order to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, one must convince himself that far-fetched, unlikely scenarios are legitimate explanations of highly probable contradictions, inconsistencies, and other discrepancies, and one must believe that there was a time when supernatural events such as the parting of the Red Sea, the sun standing still in the sky, humans walking unharmed through a fiery furnace, angels dropping in for visits, the resurrecting of the dead, and such like happened with routine regularity.

The more inerrantists attempt to defend their position, the more inept and ridiculous they appear. Of course, this comment is probably feeding some persecution syndrome of inerrantists. Nevertheless, I think it would be safe to say that if a Muslim employed the type of rationalizations and postulated absurdities of inerrantists, the inerrantist would waste no time pointing out this fact to the Muslim.

Almost all biblical fundamentalists use an appalling double standard. They accept as truth, unequivocally, all of the fabulous tales that many people believe for no other reason except that the Bible tells them so. Yet, when such tales are recorded in other books, they are able to look at them more objectively, apply sensible standards of literary criticism, and reject them as real historical events. They would never consider believing outrageous claims made in the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Avesta, or the Hindu Vedas, but if the Bible says that Moses parted the Red Sea, that a donkey talked to a man, that three men walked unharmed through a fiery furnace, that Jesus was born of a virgin, they believe it. The Bible tells them so.

Ignorance can be cured. Willful ignorance can only be quarantined.

And finally:

If you prefer a sadist for a god, then keep your hell of fire and brimstone. You are welcome to it. However, do not mistake us for simple-minded children who may be frightened by such talk. [Hell] is an evolved, man-made concept. Thus, hell holds no terror for us. There is no "grim truth" there to be owned up to at some future date, except in ignorant minds. We do not waste our time and energy on such idiocy.


Cliff notes: If you skimmed through them, go back and read them again.

I like this one a lot.

My favorites:

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time." - Bertrand Russell

"[Prior to September 11th, 2001,] many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labeled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!" - Richard Dawkins

"When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion" - Robert Pirsig

"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

all that ever should need to be said on atheism

"The here and now is not something to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it." - Dawkins

"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."
- Dawkins

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
- Dawkins

"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?"
- Dawkins

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here"
- Dawkins

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

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

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
- Sagan

"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

"Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that, which cannot exist when I do?"
- Epicurus

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. [...] Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." - Darwin

Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to 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

Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov

Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. — Woody Allen

I know we've seen this one before in the atheists pic thread, but I it so much.

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

-Joseph Stalin



“Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?”

Joseph Stalin

“Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.”

Joseph Stalin


“I believe in one thing only, the power of human will.”

Joseph Stalin

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

-H.L. Mencken (who had a couple, as I see from the listings above).

"God's only excuse is that He does not exist."
- Stendhal

Don't be silly, those are obviously not your favorite quotes.

"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."
- Frederick Douglass

So what if he was a Christian! Still a great quote, and appropriate for this thread (I hope).

Gimme a break!

Ok here's the link.

"If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people."

-House

Eh, if we're allowed fictional characters:

...take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged. - Death (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)

There is no justice. There's just me. - Death (same).

This guy is one of those hi falootin philosophers I am always making fun of isn't he? May have to reconsider. This says it all.

If anyone deserves to be reconsidered, it's Nietzsche. Mann called his works, "[S]tylistically dazzling...sparkling with audacious insults to his age, venturing into more and more radical psychology, radiating a more and more glaring white light."

He was nearly blind, a hopeless insomniac, and suffered constantly from dysenteric complications. Everyone ignored his work. But still: "[I am] a man who wishes nothing more than daily to lose some reassuring belief, who seeks and finds his happiness in this daily greater liberation of the mind."

And he remains, perhaps, the only man to have offered the Modern Age a motto worthy of its weight..."The most concerned ask today: 'How is man to be preserved?' But Zarathustra is the first and only one to ask: 'How is man to be overcome?'"

It's better in context, but . . .

"So in order to impress Himself, Jesus had himself tortured and executed, in vicarious punishment for a symbolic sin committed by a non-existent individual? As I said, barking mad as well as viciously unpleasant."

-Dawkins

Is that Jib rocking the long hair in his avatar?

Jib,

Stalin was religious. It's just that he was God.

Oh, and DI-TECH.

The idea of a god implies the abdication of human reason and justice. It is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind in both theory and practice. - Mikhail Bakun

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color. --Don Hirschberg

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." - H. L. Mencken