Best atheist quotes

Robert A Heinlein

Arthur C Clarke

Isaac Asimov

Best atheist quotes

Most Popular Atheist Quotes

Why is it often that, when someone points out the lies of another person, the person who lied gets angry, rather than abashed. Never is this more apparent than when the lie pointed out is a lie to oneself, and the anger never more fierce than when the lie is one of religion.

-        G. Scott Wells

 

Atheism is a requirement for a complete human being. Religion is a crutch that is shackled to you, one you never really needed in the first place, but were convinced by others that you couldn’t live without. Once you discover it’s only an illusion, that it’s not even a real crutch, you discard it gladly.

-        Brent Yaciw

 

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

 

If God objected to [people with various handicaps], he ought not have created such people.

-        Robert G Ingersoll (paraphrase)

 

Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.

-        Gene Roddenberry

 

“Hence today I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator”

-        Adolph Hitler

 

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”

-        George W. Bush

 

“There are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes.

-        James Morrow

 

A country dominated by televangelism would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers, who envisioned religion as personal and spiritua, not social and political. No particular variety of religion was intended to control the political agenda, to set the community’s moral tone or to judge who are the true believers and members of our society. But this is precisely the objective of the electric church

-        Razelle Frankel

 

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.

-        David Stevens

 

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

-        Samuel Clemens

 

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes

-        James K. Feibleman

 

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

 

All religions have been made by men.

-        Napoleon Bonaparte

 

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

-        Matthew Arnold

 

All thinking men are atheists.

-        Ernest Hemingway

 

And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.

And 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 Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.

-        Thomas Jefferson

 

As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don’t know, 50,000,000 years of that I’d start to get a little bored.

-        Rick Reynolds

 

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

-        William Blake

 

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, ‘atheist’ is a term that should not ever exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a ‘non astrologer’ or a ‘non-alchemist’. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to ‘never doubt the existence of God’ should be obliged to present evidence for his existence-and, indeed, for his BENEVOLENCE, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day.

-        Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

 

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.

-        Thomas Jefferson

 

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

-        Albert Einstein

 

Born again?! No, I’m not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time.

-        Dennis Miller

 

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

-        Mark Twain

 

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

-        Voltaire

 

Chritianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.

-        Thomas Jefferson

 

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

-        Isaac Asimov

 

Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millenia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to ‘hasten the inevitable,’ not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion.

-        Dennett, Breaking the Spell, pg 338

 

I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.

-        Jules Renard

 

England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.

-        Voltaire

 

If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? Priest: No, not if you did not know. Eskimo: Then why did you tell me?

-        Eskimo

 

Everything is what it is because it got that way.

-        D’arcy Thompson

 

Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions.

-        Frater Ravus

 

Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.

-        Dan Barker, former evangelist

 

Faith is believing in that which I know ain’t so.

-        Mark Twain

 

Faith is the fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God’s integrity instead of one’s own.

-        Matt Berry

 

Faith means not wanting to know what is true.

-        Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance.

-        Robert Green Ingersoll

 

Few intelligent Christians can still hold to the idea that the Bible is an infallible Book, that it contains no linguistic errors, no historical discrepancies, no antiquated scientific assumptions, not even bad ethical standards. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages. The existence of thousands of variations of texts makes it impossible to hold the doctrine of a book verbally infallible. Some might claim for the original copies of the Bible an infallible character, but this view only begs the question and makes such Christian apologetics more ridiculous in the eyes of the sincere man.

-        Elmer Homrighausen, Christianity in America

 

For there is nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so.

-        William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet, II.ii

 

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

-        Edward Abbey

 

God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.

-        Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Contact

 

God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?

-        Samuel Johnson

 

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

-        Voltaire

 

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

-        John Lennon

 

God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God

-        Unknown

 

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.

-        Laurence J. Peter

 

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.

-        William Drummond

 

Heaven will be a great place as long as you keep the christians out.

-        G. Janus

 

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.

-        Robert Heinlein

 

How come when it’s us is an abortion and when it’s a chicken is an omelet?

-        George Carlin

 

How do I know the Bible isn’t the word of God? Well if it was the word of God it would be clear and easy to understand…considering God was the creator of LANGUAGE!

-        Bill Hicks.

 

I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.

-        Bertrand Russell

 

I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.

-        D. Dale Gulledge

 

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

 

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 do not believe any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.

-        Thomas Alva Edison

 

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

-        Galileo Galilei

 

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

 

I don’t know anyone less Jesus like than Christians.

-        Bill Maher

 

I don’t see any god up here first man in space, while in space.

-        Yuri Gagarin

 

I have as much authority as the pope, I just don’t have as many people that believe it.

-        George Carlin

 

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘Oh, Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ and God granted it.

-        Voltaire

 

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

-        Mohandas Gandhi

 

I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian. The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat—which wasn’t there. That may be, said the philosopher: but a theologian would have found it.

-        Julian Huxley, The Creed of a Scientific Humanist

 

I refuse to prove that I exist says God, for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.  Oh, says man, but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn’t it?  It proves You exist, and so therefore You don’t.  Q.E.D.  Oh, I hadn’t thought of that, says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

-        Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

 

I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

-        Oscar Wilde

 

I would never want to be the member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.

-        George Carlin

 

I’d rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

-        Gerry Spencer

 

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?

-        Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

If god is the alpha and the omega. The begining and the end, knows what has passed and what is to come, like it states in the bible, why do people pray and think it will make any difference.

-        Mark Fairclough

 

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words.  I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

-        Isaac Asimov, I.  Asimov:  A Memoir

 

If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circustance.

-        Theodore Dreiser

 

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

-        Albert Einstein

 

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

-        Epicurus

 

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”

-        Edmond de Goncourt

 

If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?

-        Art Hoppe

 

If we are to believe the Bible, god created a flood that nearly wiped out all of mankind, taking genocide to epic proportions. Why then is god worshiped and Hitler, who committed genocide on a smaller scale, labeled evil for similar acts?

-        Scott Williams

 

If we expect God to subscribe to one religion at the exclusion of all the others, then we should expect damnation as a matter of chance. This should give Christians pause when expounding their religious beliefs, but it does not.

-        Sam Harris

 

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.

-        Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature

 

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

-        Gregory House

 

I’m proud to be an atheist – it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.

-        Dan Barker

 

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find my self in – an interesting hole I find my self in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

-        Douglass Adams

 

In a dangerous world, there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.

-        Nicholas Humphrey’s Law of the Efficacy of Prayer

 

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

-        Friederich Nietzsche

 

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beutiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

-        Douglas Adams

 

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

 

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

-        Carl Sagan

 

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere… Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. 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

 

It’s fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.

-        Penn Jillette

 

Just because you believe in something does not mean that it is true.

-        Albert Einstein

 

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

-        Bill Gates

 

Let’s face a historical truth: we have never had a free market, we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with big government when it served their needs.

-        Howard Zinn

 

Let’s face it; God has an ego problem, why do we always have to worship him?

-        Bill Maher

 

Lighthouses are more helpful then churches.

-        Benjamin Franklin

 

Lighthouses are more useful than Churches.

-        Benjamin Franklin

 

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfullly as when they do it from a religious conviction

-        Blaise Pascale

 

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

 

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

-        Denis Diderot.

 

Moral:  a peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that of Deut. 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing, you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord.

-        Donald Morgan

 

My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.

-        William Orville Douglas

 

Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all.

-        Baron d’Holbach, Good Sense

 

Nothing could be more idiotic and absurd than the doctrine of the trinity.

-        Robert Green Ingersoll

 

Nothing could be more idiotic and absurd than the doctrine of the trinity

-        Robert Green Ingersoll

 

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

-        George Orwell

 

One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.

-        Robert Heinlein

 

People who don’t like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn’t have such funny beliefs.

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

-        Anonymous

 

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.

-        Ambroce Bierce

 

Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived.

-        Isaac Asimov

 

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

-        Frank Zappa

 

Religion can never reform mankind, because Religion is slavery.

-        Robert G. Ingersoll

 

Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people.

-        Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney

 

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man — living in the sky — who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! ..But He loves you.

-         George Carlin

 

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

-        Jose Carrillo

 

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet”

-        Napoleon Bonaparte

 

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

 

Religion is not fate, religion is fake, spirituality comes from the heart not from the pages of some out dated book written by mere men

-        Madd Maxxx

 

Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.

-        H. L. Mencken

 

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.

-        Arthur C. Clarke

 

Religion is the opium of the masses.

-        Karl Marx

 

Religion is the opium of the masses.

-        Karl Marx

 

Religion:  A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

-        Ambrose Bierce

 

Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies.

-        Thomas Jefferson

 

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

-        Kurt Vonnegut

 

Since no one really knows anything about God, those who think they do are just troublemakers.

-        Rabia Al-Basri

 

So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake. Religion is all bunk.

-        Thomas Alva Edison

 

Sunday school:  a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

-        H.L. Mencken

 

Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned

-        Mark Twain

 

Tell me there is a God in the serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest belief! More men have died in their sins, judged by your orthodox creeds, than there are leaves in all the forests in the wide world ten thousand times over. Tell me these men are in Hell; that these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the most infamous of lies.

-        Robert G. Ingersoll

 

The being we call god is merely a pawn working for a powerful and rational force in some far-off galaxy. This force is trying to weed out people who are irrational by seeing who would be stupid enough to believe in his god illusion so easily. Those that believe in this illusion, he will send to eternal damnation and he will deliver the rational beings, those who stoically refused to believe in a god, to heaven.

-        Nicholas Yee

 

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness

-        Joseph Conrad

 

The Bible is a book that has been read more, and examined less, than any book that ever existed.

-        Thomas Paine

 

The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.

-         Thomas Jefferson

 

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

-        Friederich Nietzsche

 

The church says 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 a shadow than in the church.

-        Ferdinand Magellan

 

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

 

The family that prays together…is brainwashing their children.

-        Albert Einstein

 

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

-        Richard Dawkins

 

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

-        Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, ch. 2.

 

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 duly thankful for out blessings.

-        Garrett Hardin

 

The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.

-        Robert Green Ingersoll

 

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

-        Huang Po

 

The moment we admit that our beliefs are attempts to represent states of the world, we see that they must stand in right relation to the world to be valid.

-        Sam Harris, The End Of Faith

 

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

-        Socrates.

 

The study of theology,  as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing.

-        Thomas Paine, in The Age Of Reason, quoted with approval by David Mills in Atheist Universe, ch. 6.

 

The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding – in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

-        Friederich Nietzsche

 

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can change this.

-        Albert Einstein

 

The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.

-        Abu Ala Al-Maari

 

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

 

There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa.  They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land.  They said Let us pray, and we dutifully shut our eyes.  When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible.

-        Desmond M. Tutu, Religious Human Rights and the Bible

 

There is not enough love and kindness in the world to give any of it away to imaginary beings.

-        Friederich Nietzsche

 

There’s a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.

-        Frank Zappa

 

This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.

-        John Adams

 

Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn’t anyone else around when Mohammed got the word either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audiences with God. We have to trust them as reporters—and you know how reporters are. They’ll do anything for a story.

-        Andy Rooney

 

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit attrocities.

-        Voltaire

 

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

-         Marquis De Sade

 

To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

-        Eric Hoffer

 

To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me.

-        Charles William Stubbs

 

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.

-        Thomas Jefferson

 

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen! If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.

-        Dan Barker

 

Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.-

-        Christopher Hitchens, god is not great, ch. 15.

 

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

-        Richard Dawkins

 

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

-        Samuel Johnson

 

We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.

-        Hume, TNHR

 

We may conclude, therefore, that, in all nations, which have embraced polytheism, the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind.

-        Hume, The Natural History of Religion

 

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

-        Joseph Campbell

 

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

 

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

-        H.L. Mencken

 

We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn’t been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake.

-        Catherine Fahringer

 

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

-        Isaac Asimov

 

When you understand why you don’t believe in other people’s gods, you will understand why I don’t believe in yours.

-        Albert Einstein

 

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope?  If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t.

-        George Bernard Shaw

 

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

 

Without religion, we’d have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

-        Stephen Weinburg

 

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

-        Abraham Lincoln

Most Popular Atheist Quotes

Popular Atheist Quotes from the Past

Fundamentalism, of any type, due to its prerequisite lack of intelligent thought, could prove to be the worst weapon of mass destruction, of all.David J. Constable

Jesus hardly made the greatest sacrifice. He knew he would be resurrected anyway. – Anonymous

Most religions prophecy the end of the world and then consistently work together to ensure that these prophecies come true. – Anonymous

People who don’t like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn’t have such funny beliefs. – Anonymous

Religion is like a virus that affects the behaviour of its host in such a way as to propagate itself further. – Jack Pritchard

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

The Bible – A Fairytale book of rules brainwashing millions. Obliviously used to help create war, kill, hate, judge and discriminate. – Anonymous

To really be free, You need to be free in the mind. – Alexander Loutsis

Today’s religion will be the future’s mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever. – Steven Crocker

Why can’t we see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? – Douglas Adams

. People will then often say, ‘But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?’ This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.) – Douglas Adams

. 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

. They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it’s a good thing. – Steven Weinberg

“There are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes. – James Morrow

A believer states everything must have a creator but fail to say how he was created. – Anonymous

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified. – Karen Armstrong

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it. – David Stevens

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. – Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power but absolute power is corrupt only in the hands of the absolutely faithful. – Anonymous

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science. – Matthew Arnold

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. – John Buchan

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence. – Bertrand Russell

Animals do not have gods, they are smarter than that. – Ronnie Snow

As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don’t know, Bobbayears of that I’d start to get a little bored. – Rick Reynolds

Atheism is a non-prophet organization. – George Carlin

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. – Sam Harris

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be

Atheists will celebrate life, while you’re in church celebrating death. – Anonymous

Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. – Richard Dawkins

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. – Edward Abbey

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, Bobba, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have. – Penn Jillette

billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. – Mark Twain

Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence. – Anonymous

Bobba. I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose – Clarence Darrow

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

Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. – Frater Ravus

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

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish. – Anonymous

God should be executed for crimes against humanity. – Bryan Emmanuel Gutierrez

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. – Chapman Cohen

Gods dont kill people. People with Gods kill people. – David Viaene

guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. – Francis Bacon

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. – William Drummond

History teaches us that no other cause has brought more death than the word of god. – Giulian Buzila

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. – Richard Dawkins

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. – Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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 do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake… Religion is all bunk. – Thomas Edison

I have no need for religion, I have a conscience. – Anonymous

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, a heretic, or an unbeliever. – Daniel Boorstin

I refuse to believe in a god who is the primary cause of conflict in the world, preaches racism, sexism, homophobia, and ignorance, and then sends me to hell if I’m ‘bad’. – Mike Fuhrman

I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing. – Douglas Adams

I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence. – Doug McLeod

I wonder who got the **** job of scouring the planet for the  species of butterfly or the  species of ant they eventually took on board Noah’s Ark. But at least we got that magical rainbow for all their trouble. – Azura Skye

I’m a polyatheist – there are many gods I don’t believe in. – Dan Fouts

If all the Christians who have called other Christians “not really a Christian” were to vanish, there’d be no Christians left. – Anonymous

If God created the world, then who created god? and who created whoever created god? So somewhere along the line something had to just be there. So why can’t we just skip the idea of god and go straight to earth? – Ryan Hanson

If god is the alpha and the omega. The begining and the end, knows what has passed and what is to come, like it states in the bible, why do people pray and think it will make any difference. – Mark Fairclough

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself. – Alexandre Dumas

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. – Isaac Asimov

If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. – Woody Allen

If we expect God to subscribe to one religion at the exclusion of all the others, then we should expect damnation as a matter of chance. This should give Christians pause when expounding their religious beliefs, but it does not. – Sam Harris

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. – Friedrich Nietzsche

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

It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand

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

It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible. – George W. Foote

Man has always required an explanation for all of those things in the world he did not understand. If an explanation was not available, he created one. – Jim Crawford

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

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism. – Annie Wood Besant

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

Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men. – Voltaire

On the first day, man created God. – Anonymous

People ask me what I think about that woman priest thing. What, a woman priest? Women priests. Great, great. Now there’s priests of both sexes I don’t listen to. – Bill Hicks

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. – Anonymous

Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived. – Isaac Asimov

Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people. – Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea. – Anonymous

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

Religion is the opiate of the masses. – Karl Marx

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

Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going? – Anonymous

that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. – Mark Twain

The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. – Penn and Teller

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. – George Bernard Shaw

The finality of death is the coldest truth one must face. Religion makes the perfect distraction. – Anonymous

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. – Richard Dawkins

The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it. – Robert G. Ingersoll

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. – Delos B. McKown

The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence. – Abu’l‐Ala al Ma’arri

To say that atheism requires faith is as dim-witted as saying that disbelief in pixies or leprechauns takes faith. Even if Einstein himself told me there was an elf on my shoulder, I would still ask for proof and I wouldn’t be wrong to ask. – Geoff Mather

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. – Isaac Asimov

Top  most popular atheist quotes from famous and not so famous atheists.

Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer. – Anonymous

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. – Richard Dawkins

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

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. – Christopher Hitchens

What has been Christianity’s fruits? Superstition, Bigotry and Persecution. – James Madison

What’s “God”? Well, you know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you. – Steve Buscemi (From the movie “The Island”)

When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life. – Sigmund Freud

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

Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s? – Friedrich Nietzsche

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 do not need the Bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate. – Richard A. Weatherwax

 

Popular Atheist Quotes from the Past