Quotes on Atheism

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.

You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.

But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.

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

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

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

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.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody's mom in that she knows what's best for us. But if you look at the historical record - Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages - you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

(W)e do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment.

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.