Quotes on Atheism

I don't believe in heaven and hell. I don't know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won't allow this life - the only thing I know to exist - to be wasted.

One does not have to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through the laws of physics.

For those who may not find happiness to exercise religious faith, it's okay to remain a radical atheist; it's absolutely an individual right, but the important thing is with a compassionate heart - then no problem.

I can not imagine a God ... made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him 'great'.

The mind gives meaning to anything but the meaning it gives is meaningless.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Superstition is an enemy to civil liberty.

[priests are] the pretenders to power and dominion, and to a superior sanctity of character, distinct from virtue and good morals.

Every church that has a standard higher than human welfare is dangerous.

Ignorance worships mystery; reason explains it; the one grovels, the other soars.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

Evolution ... is opportunistic, hence unpredictable.

The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy. When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others.

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.

The settled opinion here is that religion is essentially distinct from Civil Govt. and exempt from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to both.

There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermingle with religion. Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation.

Indeed, when religious people quarrel about religion, or hungry people quarrel about victuals, it looks as if they had not much of either among them.

The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion.