Quotes on Positive Atheism

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.

I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 percent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity, while seeing themselves as stepping stones to the Almighty.

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

It is time enough, for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere [in the propagation of religious teachings] when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.

Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.

Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.

A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions.

The rights [to religious freedom] are of the natural rights of mankind, and ... if any act shall be ... passed to repeal [an act granting those rights] or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.

Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

Conscience is the most sacred of all property.

I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet-I am inclined to expect one.

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.