Positive Atheism Quotes

No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact. ~ Thomas Hobbes

If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong. ~ Francis Crick

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. ~ H.L. Mencken

There is no hell. There is only France. ~ Frank Zappa

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad. ~ Emile M. Cioran

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. ~ Voltaire

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? ~ John Updike

We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible. ~ A.J. Ayer

What is the use of assuring Fundamentalists that science is compatible with religion. They retort at once, Certainly not with our religion. ~ Luther Burbank

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self. ~ Eric Hoffer

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In that we say he [Christ] made whole the lame, the paralytic, and those born blind, we seem to say what is very similar to the deeds said to have been done by Esculapius. ~ Justin Martyr

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far. ~ George Santayana

Religious freedom in an open society has the best prospects of flourishing to the extent that it expresses itself as freedom of religious inquiry. ~ Sidney Hook

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great. ~ Havelock Ellis

It is a curious paradox of human history that a doctrine that tells human beings to regard themselves as sacrificial animals has been accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for mankind. ~ Nathaniel Branden

We will no longer be oppressed by the fascism called Christianity. We will no longer be oppressed by the mentality of the police state. ~ Marilyn Manson

We created god in our own image and likeness! ~ George Carlin

I've been an agnostic for as long as I can remember ... so I don't know where we go. But if it turns out that the lights are just turned off and nothing happens, well, that's okay. ~ John Chancellor

Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy. ~ Paul Kurtz

Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that it does not believe a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in god. No lower opinion of the human race has ever been expressed. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

That no Flake of [snow] fall on you or them - is a wish that would be a Prayer, were Emily not a Pagan. ~ Emily Dickinson

Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers. ~ William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god - both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter. ~ Dan Barker

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism. ~ Denis Diderot

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare. ~ Anthony Burgess

You need not value it yourself if you do not wish to; but you ought to allow it to us who do value it. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it. ~ Northrop Frye

I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits ... Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gipsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum. ~ John Adams

I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Christians call it faith ... I call it the herd. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will. ~ Alexander Herzen

There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed
to persecute all other sects and to plunder their own. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. ~ Charles Darwin

I cannot follow you Christians; for you try to crawl through your life upon your knees, while I stride through mine on my feet. ~ Charles Bradlaugh

It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion, to which free will and not force should lead us. ~ Tertullian

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man. ~ Thomas Paine

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him ~ H.L. Mencken

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity ... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods. ~ George Santayana

Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. ~ Olive Schreiner

A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures. ~ Ambrose Bierce

I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions ... Nor has the Church's ardent "desire to depart, and be with Christ," ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure. ~ John Ruskin

Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once. ~ Richard Dawkins

Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald's. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, "Because I am Feynman!" The young man went, "Ahhhhh!" ~ Richard P. Feynman

What good deed can government do for religion? The best deed of all: leave it free and unencumbered, burdened by neither enmity nor amity. ~ Edwin Gaustad

You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject. ~ Antony Flew

My father taught me that the question Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God? ~ John Stuart Mill

I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas. ~ George Carlin

As a preacher, I'm working with the crowd, watching the crowd, trying to bring them to that high point at a certain time in the evening. I let everything build up to that moment when they're all in ecstasy. The crowd builds up and you have to watch it that you don't stop it. You start off saying you've heard that tonight's going to be a great night; then you begin the whole pitch and keep it rolling. ~ Marjoe Gortner

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. ~ Mark Twain

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity. ~ Charles Eliot Norton

Sometimes a radio station will get ONE phone call from ONE person who screams that he is going to complain to the FCC. Instead of the guy at the stating thinking about how many listeners love the song, want to hear it again, and will support the station for playing it, usually the guy panics
and takes my records off the air. I object that.
It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think 'I'm wrong.' The number of people who thought Hitler was 'right' did not make him 'right.' The same principle should be applied to anyone who has an individualistic attitude. Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are? ~ Frank Zappa

Hmmm, completely a-religious - atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both. ~ Linus Torvalds

Empathising with the younger children on whom the same confidence trick was being imposed, I embarked on a crusade around the neighbourhood, telling all the kids that there was no Santa Claus. This reached the ears of the father of a neighbouring family, who reproved me for spoiling it for the little ones. Spoiling it! I could not understand what he meant. To my mind, they were being made fools of, and I was only saving them from this indignity. ~ Barbara Smoker

We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know. ~ Archibald MacLeish

If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed. ~ William Winwood Reade

Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, [is] religion; not allowed, superstition. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ. ~ Emma Goldman

If there is no military need for the building, leave it alone, neither putting anyone in or out of it, except on finding some one preaching or practicing treason, in which case lay hands on him, just as if he were doing the same thing in any other building. ~ Abraham Lincoln

A large stone presented by the archangel Gabriel to the patriarch Abraham, and preserved at Mecca. The patriarch had perhaps asked the archangel for bread. ~ Ambrose Bierce

We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world. ~ Chapman Cohen

To reorganize society without God or King, by the systematic culture of Humanity. ~ Auguste Comte

Morality does not depend on religion. ~ John Ruskin

I can think of no greater disaster to this country than to have the voters of it divide upon religious lines. ~ Al Smith

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck

The Crime, from us, is hidden, [though] he is presumed to know. ~ Emily Dickinson

When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions. ~ Walter Lippmann

One afternoon ... I was seized and put into jail, because ... I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Bryan - a great friend of mine, by the way - had a Neanderthal type of head, Burbank says. As to Riley, he has not even the oratorical skill of Bryan. The whole movement is based on the poor whites of the south. ~ Luther Burbank

I finally accepted Jesus. not as my personal savior, but as a man I intend to borrow money from. ~ George Carlin

The argument from design stands or falls on whether it can be demonstrated that some aspect of the universe such as its origin or biological life could not have come about naturally. The burden of proof is ... on the supernaturalist to demonstrate that something from outside nature must be introduced to explain the data. ~ Victor J. Stenger

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself. ~ George Santayana

I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know. ~ James Randi

Nowhere in the Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue. ~ Marilyn Manson

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

In all countries, and in all ages, from the Druids down to brother Beecher, priests have aimed at universal power. ~ Anne Royall

Everything serious that he says is a joke and everything humorous that he says is dead serious. ~ Clarence Darrow

Fanaticism and bigotry require any food but common sense and reason, which would break the charm of those spellbound fanatics. ~ Anne Royall

To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God! ~ Andre Breton

Whether you interpret the Bible as literature or as the final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all of our lives. ~ Marilyn Manson

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries. ~ Phillip Adams

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission. ~ Emile M. Cioran

A scenario is suggested by which the universe and its laws could have arisen naturally from nothing. Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable. ~ Victor J. Stenger

The basis of your religion is injustice. The Son of God the pure, the immaculate, the innocent, is sacrificed for the guilty. This proves his heroism, but no more does away with man's sin than a school boy's volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate a dunce from negligence. ~ Lord Byron

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Religion, society and state - from none of these do women get their proper honor. It is religion, which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women. ~ Taslima Nasrin

In a liberal scientific society, to claim that you are above error is the height of irresponsibility. ~ Jonathan Rauch

The right to private judgment is the crown jewel of humanity, and for any person or institution to dare to come between the soul and God is a blasphemous impertinence and a defamation of the crown rights of the Son of God. ~ George W Truett

I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack. ~ Richard Dawkins

The clear and perfect truth no man has seen, nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things ... ; for, however perfect what he says may be, yet he does not know it; all things are matters of opinion. ~ Xenophanes

The whole story is about change. We are very lucky that the earth's history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the changes. Unfortunately, there will always be gaps in our knowledge, but there is no doubt that we and everything living today has evolved. ~ Richard Leakey

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father. ~ Sigmund Freud

The general government is proscribed from the interfering, in any manner whatsoever, in matters respecting religion; and it may be thought to do this, in ascertaining who, and who are not, ministers of the gospel. ~ James Madison

[If] the nature of ... government [were] a subordination of the civil to the ecclesiastical power, I [would] consider it as desperate for long years to come. Their steady habits [will] exclude the advances of information, and they [will] seem exactly where they [have always been]. And there [the] clergy will always keep them if they can. [They] will follow the bark of liberty only by the help of a tow-rope. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke. ~ Victor J. Stenger

Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell. ~ H.L. Mencken

A mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms. ~ Karen Armstrong