Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
~ Jean Rostand
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
Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
~ Michel de Montaigne
Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?
~ Nietzsche
We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?
~ Abraham Lincoln
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
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~ George Bernard Shaw
Religion, comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.
~ Sigmund Freud
The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot
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
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
If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
~ Thomas Szasz
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
~ Napoleon
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
~ Albert Einstein
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
One man’s magic is another man’s engineering. Supernatural is a null word.
~ Robert Heinlein
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
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
~ George Orwell
If child molestation is actually your concern, how come we don’t see Bradley tanks knocking down Catholic churches?
~ Bill Hicks
Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith … we need believing people.
~ Adolf Hitler
I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
~ Mohandas Gandhi
If god created us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment.
~ Voltaire
The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
~ Thomas Paine
I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
~ James Buchanan
When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
~ Jack Gurney – “The Ruling Class”
Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
~ Ron Patterson
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
~ Jeff Burroughs
I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’
~ Annie Dillard
I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.
~ Adolf Hitler
The most heinous and the cruelest crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
~ Mohandas Gandhi
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
~ Douglas Adams
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
~ Thomas Jefferson
All Bibles are man-made.
~ Thomas Edison
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 egotisms…
~ Albert Einstein
In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
~ Carl Sagan
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
~ J. Krishnamurthi
Man is the 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
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
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
~ Bertrand Russel
I have examined all of the known superstitions of the world and I do not find in our superstitions of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.
~ Thomas Jefferson
If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
~ Jonathan Meades
I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
~Saint Augustine
Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
~ Robert Heinlein
There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil. Suddenly the light broke through to me and I saw a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty. Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?
~ H. G. Wells
The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.
~ Pope Pius IX
To date, despite the efforts of millions of true believers to support this myth, there is no more evidence for the Judeo-Christian god than any of the gods on Mount Olympus.
~ Joseph Daleiden
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
Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?
~ Epicurus
To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly.
~ Julian Ruck
The establishment of Christianity arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years.
~ Andrew Dickson White
The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.
~ Albert Einstein
Anyone who has two shirts when someone has none is not a Christian.
~ Lenny Bruce
The church tries to save sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
~ Elbert Hubbard
I can’t embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages; and that persecution still goes on today, all over the world.
~ Amanda Donohoe
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
If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
~ Steve Allen
Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.
~ Gary Zukav
Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.
~ Tao Te Ching
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
~ Sir R. F. Burton
All natural 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
The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion, the religion which based on experience, which refuses dogma.
~ Albert Einstein
I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.
~ Thomas Edison
If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.
~ Aleister Crowley
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.
~ Steven Weinberg
Mythology is what we call someone else’s religion.
~ Joseph Campbell
Beware the man of one book.
~ Saint Thomas Aquinas
