Quotes on Atheism

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.

Monotheistic religions alone furnish the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, heretical tribunals, that breaking of idols and destruction of images of the gods, that razing of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi, which had looked on the sun 3,000 years: just because a jealous god had said, Thou shalt make no graven image.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.

The whole thing [religion] 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.

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

I give money for church organs in the hope the organ music will distract the congregation's attention from the rest of the service.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.