" The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma. "

" 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. "

" I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.....Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make half the world fools and half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world. "

" As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. "

" Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. "

" I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. "

" I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies. "

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. "

" 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. "

" What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy. "

" Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise. "

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

" The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. "

" I do not believe in the creed of the Roman Church, in the Protestant Church, the Greek Church, or the Turkish Church. My own mind is my church. "

" Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous 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. "

" 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. "

" The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun. "

" 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. "

" When I became convinced that the Universe is natural -- that all the ghosts and gods are myth, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bards, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. "

" With soap, baptism is a good thing. "

" The inspiration of the Bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it. "

" Hands that help are far better then lips that pray. "

" Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on hand-outs. All beggars teach that others should give. "

" For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings. "

" Environment is a sculptor -- a painter. If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them. "

" Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own? "

" Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good; and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness. "

" The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a god. This god is emotionally unsatisfying...It does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity. "

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

" Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience...

All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are 'scientifically illiterate.' That's... the same fraction... of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War. "

" Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. "

" Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings, will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. "

" 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 religion than it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. "

" 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; 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. "

" 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 minds harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature. "

" I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. "

" I don't think we're here for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say 'Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose' but I'm anticipating a good lunch. "

" 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. "

" Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered. "

" Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, but they still control that of the children. This means that children will have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about evolution, about David killing Goliath instead of Koch killing 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 prey to quacks of every kind and makes it difficult for them to accept the methods of thought that are successful in science. "

" Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are? "

" Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition. "

" If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I believe that relgion is the belief in future life and in God. I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose. "

" I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment, to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. "

" Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. "

" I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will--and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. 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. "

" 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. "

" I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. "

" All thinking men are atheists. "

" If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian. "

" Man is a marvelous curiosity... he thinks he is the Creator's pet... he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea. "

" One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world was flat. "

" It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. "

" Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge. "

" When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it. "

" 'A philosopher,' said the theologian, 'is like a blind man looking in a dark room for a black cat which isn't there.'

'Yes,' replied the philosopher, 'and if I were a theologian, I'd find the cat!' "

" 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, intelligent enough. "

" At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas. "

" At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction. "

" It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. "

" All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fear, fraud, greed, imagination and poetry. "

" Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific cooperation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. 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. "

" Religion is based mainly on fear... 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... My own view on 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. "

" I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. "

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

" It's an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous. "

" Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. "

" For centuries, theologians have attempted to explain the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing. "

" The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. "

" Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth. "

" 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. "

" Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings. "

" There is so much in the bible against which every insinct of my being rebels, so much so that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end. I do not think that the knowledge I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced upon my attention. "

" I turned to speak to God, About the world's despair; But to make bad matters worse, I found God wasn't there. "

" Forgive, O Lord, my little joke on Thee and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me. "

" I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way. "

" I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows. "

" By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none. "

" I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create. "

" I wasn't raised Catholic, but I used to go to Mass with my friends, and I viewed the whole business as a lot of very enthralling hocus-pocus. There's a guy hanging upon the wall in the church, nailed to a cross and dripping blood, and everybody's blaming themselves for that man's torment, but I said to myself, 'Forget it. I had no hand in that evil. I have no original sin. There’s no blood of any sacred martyr on my hands. I pass on all of this. "

" I believe that all important matters have to be settled here, not in the clouds somewhere after we kick off. "

" 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. "

" God is a concept by which we measure our pain. "

" I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. "

" Faith means not wanting to know what is true. "

" The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, a self-derision, and self-mutilation. "

" All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race – before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its God to be truthful and understandable in his communications. "

" The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God. "

" There is no devil and no hell. Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body: fear therefore nothing any more. "

" To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege. "

" The bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire...Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up. "

" Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. "

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

" Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil. "

" If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. "

" Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. "

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

" Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. "

" Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. "

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

" A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand they do less easily move against him believing that he has the gods on his side. "

" The death of dogma is the birth of reason. "

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?

" What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half hour? "

" All religions of a spiritual nature are inventions of man. He has created an entire system of gods with nothing more than his carnal brain. Just because he has an ego and cannot accept it, he has had to externalize it into some great spiritual device which he calls "god."

God can do all the things man is forbidden to do, such as kill people, perform miracles to gratify his will, control without any apparent responsibility, etc. If man needs such a god and recognizes that god, then he is worshiping an entity that a human being invented. Therefore, HE IS WORSHIPING BY PROXY THE MAN THAT INVENTED GOD. Is it not more sensible to worship a god that he, himself, has created in accordance with his own emotional needs - one that best represents the very carnal and physical being that has the idea-power to invent a god in the first place? "

" Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion. "

" Man creates God, then gets on his knees and worships his invention. "

" The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people. "

" The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille. "

" By the year 2000, we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God. "

" Do not find yourself in a ritual, for rituals are patterns; patterns never change and you will never either. "

" When religion is good, it will support itself. And when it is not, and God does not care to support it, and its professors call for the help of a civil power, 'tis a sign of its being a bad one. "

" The question is whether the god of nature will govern the world by his own laws or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles. "

" I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians. "

" It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams. "

" The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills. "

" In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. "

" 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. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors. "

" All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. "

" Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. "

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