Quotes on Atheism

For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.

God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.