Quotes About Religion or Atheism

"Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason."
— Martin Luther

"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."
— Martin Luther

"Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."
— Martin Luther

"Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom ...  Throw dung in her face to make her ugly.  She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism...  She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets."
— Martin Luther, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148

"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed.  Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."
— Martin Luther

"What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church? [...] a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."
— Martin Luther

"Drive them [Jews] like mad dogs from our land... let not one of them live..."
— Martin Luther

"I believe BECAUSE it's impossible."
— Tertullian (b. ca. 150-160, d. ca. 220-240), one of the writers of the early Christian Church

"The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion."
— Edward Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"  Eusebius was a 4th century Bishop of Caesarea and Church Historian, considered "the Father of Eclessiastical History"

"Unbelief is the greatest of sins."
— Thomas Aquinas

"For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner?"
— The Apostle Paul, in Romans 3:7 (KJV)

"A person is to be punished with a just penalty, who . . . utters blasphemy, or gravely harms public morals, or rails at or excites hatred of or contempt for religion or the Church."
— The Catholic Church's Canon Law 1369

"Kill them all.  God will select those who should go to heaven and those who should go to hell."
— Abbot Arnold de Citeaux, 1205 (during the Fourth Crusade)

"Kill them all, for God knows His own."
— Pope Innocent III, to his troops in the Albigensian Crusade of 1209

"God is introduced to give dignity and emphasis . . . and then He is banished.  It was this very atheistic Declaration [of Independencd] which had inspired the "higher law" doctrine of the radical antislavery men.  If the mischievous abolitionists had only followed the Bible instead of the godless Declaration, they would have been bound to acknowledge that human bondage was divinely ordained.  The mission of southerners was therefore clear; they must defend the word of God against abolitionist infidels."
— Thomas Smyth, minister of 2nd Presbyterian Church of Charleston, S.C., 11/21/1861

"Slavery itself...is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law... The purchaser [of the slave] should carefully examine whether the slave who is put up for sale has been justly or unjustly deprived of his liberty, and that the vendor should do nothing which might endanger the life, virtue, or Catholic faith of the slave."
— Vatican statement, 1866

"I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions.  I maintained that God did not exist.  I was also very angry with God for not existing.  I was equally angry with Him for creating a world."
— C. S. Lewis, famous Christian apologist and former Atheist

"The Myth of the Inquisition is just that: phony, made up, bogus."
— Gerard V. Bradley, Notre Dame Law School Professor, in "One Cheer for the Inquisitions" on Catholic.net

"We don't have to protect the environment — the Second Coming is at hand."
— James Watt, Interior Secretary under Ronald Reagan

"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.  This is one nation under God."
— President George H.W. Bush

"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."
— Adolf Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941

"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator.  By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work."
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 65

"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it."
— Adolf Hitler, ibid.

"The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built.  It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."
— Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 1933, first radio address after coming to power. Here are pictures of Christian Nazism.

"The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society."
- Adolf Hitler, speech before the Reichstag, March 1933

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . We need believing people."
— Adolf Hitler, April 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933

"The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy ...proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism..."
— Adolf Hitler in an article in the Vφlkischer Beobachter, February 1929

"I am personally convinced of the great power and deep significance of Christianity, and I won't allow any other religion to be promoted."
— Adolf Hitler

"As for the Jews, I am just carrying on with the same policy which the Catholic church has adopted for fifteen hundred years, when it has regarded the Jews as dangerous and pushed them into ghettos etc., because it knew what the Jews were like.  I don't put race above religion, but I do see the danger in the representatives of this race for Church and State, and perhaps I am doing Christianity a great service."
— Adolf Hitler

"The work that Christ started but could not finish, I - Adolf Hitler - will conclude."
— Adolf Hitler, December 1926. Here are more of his quotes.

"When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."
Catholic Father Charles Edward Coughlin, 1938

"Those who control what young people are taught, and what they experience — what they see, hear, think, and believe — will determine the future course for the nation."
— James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family

"Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever."
— Vladimir Lenin

"Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."
— Proverbs 22:6

"We believe democracy is an Atheist call that idolizes human beings."
— manifesto of Ansar al-Sunnah (Iraq terrorist group)

"We're in a religious war and we need to aggressively oppose secular humanism; these people are as religiously motivated as we are and they are filled with the devil."
— Timothy LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series

"With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."
— Bailey Smith, Christian Coalition

"On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth."
— President George W. Bush, a born-again Christian

"Faith-based organizations also need a guarantee they will not be forced to give up their right to hire people of their own faith as the price of competing for federal money.  If we want this program to be effective and to save lives, people have got to say interfacing with government will not cause me to lose my mission."
— President George W. Bush, February 2005

"He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for a biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am.  He is training me."
— Tom DeLay (R-TX), Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives

"There are a lot of very brilliant scholars who believe the reason we have incomplete science on evolution is that there is a higher power involved in this."
— Bill O'Reilly, conservative TV and radio host

"The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished."
— Sheik Abdel-Aziz ibn Baaz, Saudi Arabia’s supreme religious authority, 1993-1999

"The doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false, and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture."
— Congregation of the Index (of Prohibited Books), 1616, under Pope Paul V

"Communistic evolution, according to the Senate committee that examined it, is responsible for 135 million deaths in peacetime.  There's no religion that has a tiny fraction of that many deaths on its conscience.  There are scientists who will admit that there's not one iota of scientific evidence to support it."
— D. James Kennedy, of Coral Ridge Ministries, "the most listened-to Presbyterian minister in the world today"

"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler.  Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it."
— D. James Kennedy

"Among German historians, there's really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist.  He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas."
— Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler

"The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God.  From there people are introduced to the truth of the Bible and then the question of sin and finally introduced to Jesus."
— Phillip Johnson, creator of the idea of 'Intelligent' Design

"If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them,"
— Biology for Christian Schools, p. 1

"Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible."
— Biology for Christian Schools

"We do not know how God created, what processes He used, for God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe.  This is why we refer to divine creation as special creation.  We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by God."
— Duane Gish, in Evolution, The Fossils Say No! p. 42

"If you can't trust the Bible's history, how can you trust its morality?"
— Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis

"I did not know from a scientific perspective why I did not believe in evolution – but I knew from a Biblical perspective it had to be wrong or my faith was in trouble."
— Ken Ham, in The Lie – Evolution

"Leftist organizations are aggressively attempting to redefine America in their own Godless image."
— Reverend Jerry Falwell

"We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism...we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today...our battle is with Satan himself."
— Reverend Jerry Falwell

"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."
— Reverend Jerry Falwell

"Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.  Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it...Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory."
— Reverend Jimmy Swaggart

"The Bible is the supreme law that all governments must obey."
— Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue

"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you.  I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you.  Yes, hate is good — Our goal is a Christian nation.  We have a Biblical duty.  We are called by God to conquer this country.  We don't want equal time.  We don't want pluralism."
— Randall Terry

"Our goal must be simple.  We must have a Christian nation built on God's law, on the ten Commandments.  No apologies."
— Randall Terry

"I don't think Christians should use birth control.  You consummate your marriage as often as you like – and if you have babies, you have babies."
— Randall Terry

"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you.  I mean every word of it.  I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."
— Randall Terry (whose son happens to be gay)

"Our goal is a Christian Nation....  We have a Biblical duty; we are called by God to conquer this country.  We don't want equal time.  We don't want Pluralism.  We want theocracy.  Theocracy means God rules.  I've got a hot flash.  God rules."
— Randall Terry, April 15, 1993

"If Christian people work together, they can succeed during this decade in winning back control of the institutions that have been taken from them over the past 70 years.  Expect confrontations that will be not only unpleasant but at times physically bloody.  When it is over, I am convinced God’s people will emerge victorious."
— Reverend Pat Robertson

"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.  It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."
— Reverend Pat Robertson

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
— Ann Coulter, conservative author

"[Since 9/11] I am often asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.  The answer is: Now more than ever!"
— Ann Coulter

"God gave us the earth.  We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees.  God said, 'Earth is yours.  Take it.  Rape it.  It's yours.'"
— Ann Coulter, on Hannity & Colmes, 6/20/01

"But perhaps God’s purpose in the world (I am only thinking aloud here) is to draw his creatures to him.  And you have to admit that tragedies like this one at Virginia Tech help to do that!"
— Dinesh D’Souza

"The Church does not dictate the policies of the nation.  The Church proclaims the truth of God to which all these policies must conform."
— Father Frank Provone of Priests for Life, at a prayer breakfast during the 2000 Republican Convention

"If we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical explanation for man, then we lose the validity of Christianity.  Period".
— G. Thomas Sharp, chairman of the Creation Truth Foundation

"The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine.  Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just."
— Paul Feyerabend, quoted in 1990 by Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005

"With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists."
— Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a 2005 dissenting opinion on McCreary County vs. ACLU of Kentucky

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom."
— Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, 12/06/07

"I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards."
– Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate, 01/14/08

More Quotes from The American Taliban

Whereas dangers and threats to our Nation persist and, in this time of peril, it is appropriate that the people of the United States, leaders and citizens alike, seek guidance, strength, and resolve through prayer and fasting: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the President should issue a proclamation —
    (1) designating a day for humility, prayer, and fasting for all people of the United States; and
    (2) calling on all people of the United States—
      (A) to observe the day as a time of prayer and fasting;
      (B) to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and
            to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities; and
      (C) to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our Nation.
— H. RES. 153, 108th CONGRESS, March 27, 2003, passed by an overwhelming vote
    NOTE: A similar bill in the Senate passed unanimously

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..."
— from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

"... no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
— from Article VI of the U.S. Constitution

"The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
— from The Treaty of Tripoli, written during the administration of President George Washington, signed by President John Adams and unanimously approved by the Senate in 1797.

"E Pluribus Unum" (Out of many, one)
— The original national motto

"There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have.  It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life.  It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic."
— Richard Dawkins

"Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos.  But there the resemblance ends.  Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results.  Myths and faiths are not and do not."
— Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden

"I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life.  And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless.  I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true."
— Richard Dawkins

"My last vestige of 'hands off religion' respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the 'National Day of Prayer,' when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place."
— Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)

"To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham."
— Richard Dawkins, ibid.

"We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so."
— Richard Dawkins, Free Inquiry, Summer, 2002

"The alternative which I favor is to renounce all euphemisms and grasp the nettle of the word atheism itself, precisely because it is a taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia.  Critical mass may be harder to achieve than with some non-confrontational euphemism, but if we did achieve it with the dread word atheist, the political impact would be all the greater."
— Richard Dawkins, ibid.

"I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic."
— Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
— Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden

"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker p. 6

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think..."
— Richard Dawkins

"Another meme of the religious meme complex is called faith.  It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.  The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison.  Thomas demanded evidence.  Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence.  The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation.  The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

"[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness."
— Richard Dawkins, ibid.

"It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they’re the right religion."
— Richard Dawkins

"You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution.  The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution."
— Richard Dawkins, in Lanny Swerdlow, "My Short Interview with Richard Dawkins"

"Since all organisms inherit all their genes from their ancestors, rather than from their ancestors' unsuccessful contemporaries, all organisms tend to possess successful genes.  They have what it takes to become ancestors — and that means to survive and reproduce.  This is why organisms tend to inherit genes with a propensity to build a well-designed machine — a body that actively works as if it is striving to become an ancestor.  That is why birds are so good at flying, fish so good at swimming, monkeys so good at climbing, viruses so good at spreading.  That is why we love life and love sex and love children.  It is because we all, without a single exception, inherit all of our genes from an unbroken line of successful ancestors.  The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors.  That, in a sentence, is Darwinism."
— Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden, page 2

"Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.  Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning."
- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

"The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact.  The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact.  There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction."
— Richard Dawkins

"In childhood our credulity serves us well.  It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors.  But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks.  We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science."
— Richard Dawkins

"Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant."
— Richard Dawkins

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
— Richard Dawkins

"Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."
— Richard Dawkins

"All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them."
— Richard Dawkins

"The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough!  Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous."
— Richard Dawkins

"Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering."
— Richard Dawkins

"We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics."
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

"We are all going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.  Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.  ... The only reason we die is that we were born.  Would you rather have never been born at all?"
— Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
— Stephen Hawking

"God is ... the embodiment of the laws of the universe."
— Stephen Hawking

"Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and anti-science.  The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth.  It is time now for reason, education and science to take over."
— Madalyn Murray O'Hair - Speech, 1990

"Atheism is based upon a materialist philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but natural phenomena.  There are no supernatural forces or entities, nor can there be any.  Nature simply exists."
— Madalyn Murray O'Hair

"You hate me because I am the embodiment of all your doubts."
— Madalyn Murray O'Hair, to Christian audiences

"An Atheist loves himself and his fellow man instead of a god.  An Atheist knows that heaven is something for which we should work now, here on earth, for all men together to enjoy."
— Madalyn Murray O'Hair, 1963 statement to the Supreme Court, Murray v. Curlett

"Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence.  It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith."
— Christopher Hitchens, author of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

"Religion fosters servility and solipsism."
— Christopher Hitchens

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
— Christopher Hitchens

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him.  Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98.  Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous?  And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."
— Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation

"If you believe that the Koran is the wisest book ever written, civilised society has a problem with you, because when you read this book, it's a manifesto for religious intolerance.  There are a few lines in there that talk about the virtues of patience and charity, that is true, but in general this book is just stocked stem to stern with a genuinely theocratic, genuinely intolerant hate of unbelievers."
— Sam Harris

"I think that religion is the most dangerous and divisive ideology that we have ever produced.  It is also the only ideology that is sytematically protected from criticism, both from within and without."
— Sam Harris

"Our ability to cause ourselves harm is now spreading with 21st century efficiency, and yet we are still, to a remarkable degree, drawing our vision of how to live in this world from ancient literature.  This marriage of modern technology - destructive technology - and iron-age philosophy is a bad one."
— Sam Harris

"The evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent."
— Sam Harris

"There is a profound difference between having good reasons for believing something, and simply wanting to believe it."
— Sam Harris

"Religion gives people bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are actually available."
— Sam Harris

"The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en mass what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation."
— Sam Harris

"'Atheism' is really a term we do not need, in the same way that we don't have a word for someone who is not an astrologer.  All religious people are Atheists with respect to everyone else's religion.  We are all Atheists with respect to the thousands of dead gods that lie in that mass grave we call mythology."
— Sam Harris

"There is nothing that an Atheist needs to believe on insufficient evidence in order to reject the biblical god."
— Sam Harris

"If ever there were an antidote to dogmatism, [Atheism] is it."
— Sam Harris

"Pretending to know things that you do not know is the lifeblood of religion."
— Sam Harris

"The problem with fascism and communism was not that they are too critical of religion.  The problem is that they are too much like religions.  These are utterly dogmatic systems of thought."
— Sam Harris

"There is no society in history that has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable — too reluctant to embrace dogma, too demanding of evidence."
— Sam Harris

"It is an article of faith in many religious communities that things will go spectacularly wrong, and that this is a good thing."
— Sam Harris

"Much of the Bible or the Quran is just life-destroying gibberish, and we just have to acknowledge this and cease to take these books seriously."
— Sam Harris

"There's an all-purpose corrective here, which is just intellectual honesty.  If you cease to pretend to be certain about things that your are not certain about, see where that gets you."
— Sam Harris

"One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be appreciated is the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility while condemning scientists and other non-believers for their intellectual arrogance.  There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: 'the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain as the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend an eternity in hell....'  An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extremely arrogant scientists."
— Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, pp 74-75

"We experience happiness and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover that 'love' is largely a matter of wishing that others experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than hate.  There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others.  We discover that we can be selfish together."
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, pp.186-187

"If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like.  … But on the other hand, if somebody says, 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday,' you say, 'Fine, I respect that.'"
— Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
— Douglas Adams

"God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining."
— Douglas Adams

"If one has belief, knowledge is lacking.  If one has knowledge, belief is unnecessary."
— David Eller, Atheism Advanced

"Religion is not so bad, unless you believe it."
— David Eller, ibid.

"In the absence of evidence, the scientist says, 'I don't know,' but the religionist says, 'I believe.'"
— David Eller, ibid.

"One does not have to prove a negative.  One should assume a negative."
— David Eller, ibid.

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.  The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."
— George Bernard Shaw

"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."
— George Bernard Shaw, from "Major Barbara"

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"
— Epicurus (ca. 341-270 B.C.E.) Greek philosopher

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can and does not want to.
If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent.
If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked.
If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?
— Epicurus

"Why should I fear death?  If I am, death is not.  If death is, I am not.  Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?"
— Epicurus

"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."
— Euripides (ca. 480-406 B.C.E.) Greek poet, playwright and philospher

"If the gods do evil then they are not gods."
— Euripides

"Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?"
— Plato (ca. 424–348 B.C.E.) in the Euthyphro dilemma

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
— Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

"If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?"
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. 257

"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
— Carl Sagan

"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.  But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking...there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence."
— Carl Sagan, "Parade Magazine," March 1996

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
— David Hume & Carl Sagan

"Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong... As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from..."
— Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1981)

"Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning."
— Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine

"The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea)."
— Michael Shermer

"There is no room in science for the arbitrary meddling of an unknown force or being that intervenes who-knows-when to do who-knows-what for who-knows-why and who-knows-how.  That’s not science; that’s just magic."
— Austin Cline

"Intellectual honesty is a skill that has to be learned and a virtue that has to be practiced; it often requires you to accept unpleasant conclusions."
— John B. Hodges

"If faith is 'believing what you are told', religious ethics is 'doing what you are told'."
— John B. Hodges

"Religion is for people who have never matured in their understanding of ethics.  Religion teaches a child's view of ethics, that 'being good' means 'obeying your parent.'  It gives a moral blank check to those bold enough, dishonest enough, to claim to speak for God.  Atheism means looking at ethical questions as an adult among other adults, considering ethics as a means of maintaining peace and cooperation among equals, so that all may pursue happiness within the limits that ethics defines."
— John B. Hodges

"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."
— John Stuart Mill

"Most true believers, when faced with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, will hold on to those beliefs even more strongly."
— Mark Thomas, president and co-founder of Atheists of Silicon Valley

"True believers are continually shown by reality that their god doesn't exist, but have developed extensive coping mechanisms to deal with this cognitive dissonance."
— Mark Thomas

"Fundamentalists of different religions have more in common with each other than they do with the moderates of their own religions."
— Mark Thomas

"Christians and Jews don't believe in Allah or Brahma.  Hindus don't believe in Yahweh or Allah.  Muslims don't believe in Brahma or Yahweh.  Atheists agree with all of them."
— Mark Thomas

"The world looks like it was designed.  Of course, the Sun also looks like it goes around the Earth.  It is only thru science that we know that both of these perceptions are wrong."
— Mark Thomas

"There is little difference in the knowledge held by those who can't learn and those who won't."
— Mark Thomas

"The essence of Christianity, as I see it, is love.  The essence of Humanism (and I'm also a Humanist) is love.  At that level, we're not far apart."
— Mark Thomas

"Atheism is nothing more than a conclusion.  There are plenty of people in this world who are Atheists, but this doesn't mean we share values.  Communism is a perfect example.  Communism is for all practical purposes, a political religion: It is totalitarian, it venerates its sainted founders, it has sacred dogma that cannot be challenged; it persecutes its heretics, it does not brook disobedience, it feels no compunction against twisting science for its own means.  Even its touted "Atheism" is simply a defensive reaction against its rival religions.  It has nothing in common with the free thought of Paine or Jefferson, or the humanism of Dawkins or Einstein."
— David Fitzgerald

"I'm a strong atheist.  I believe that gods are by definition supernatural beings, that the supernatural by definition violates natural law, violating natural law is by definition impossible, and impossible things by definition can't exist."
— James Huber

"Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told.  Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right."
— Larry Mundinger, 1999

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
— Charles Darwin

"The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."
— Charles Darwin, in Life & Letters

"I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.  And that is a damnable doctrine."
— Charles Darwin

"Science is advanced by proposing and testing hypothesis, not by declaring questions unsolvable."
— N. J. Matzke

"Who knows most, doubts most."
— Robert Browning

"There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them."
— Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

"If there is a supreme being, he's crazy."
— Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)

"When did I realize I was God?  Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."
— Peter O’Toole (1932- )

"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind."
— Marquis de Sade

"Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests onself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys in a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of an illusory security and safety."
— Saul Arinsky

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."
— Thomas Paine

"The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion."
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794)

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of.  My own mind is my own church."
— Thomas Paine, ibid.

"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself.  Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe.  It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society.  When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."
— Thomas Paine, ibid.

"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason.  I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall."
— Thomas Paine, ibid.

"Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?  We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie."
— Thomas Paine, ibid.

"Reasoning with one who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to a dead man."
— Thomas Paine

"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity."
— Thomas Paine

"I put the following work under your protection.  It contains my opinion upon religion.  You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine.  He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it."
— Thomas Paine

"I detest the Bible as I detest everything that is cruel."
— Thomas Paine

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God.  It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind."
— Thomas Paine

"What is it the Bible teaches us? — raping, cruelty, and murder.  What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith."
— Thomas Paine

"And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathising and benevolent in the heart of man."
— Thomas Paine

"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."
— Thomas Paine

"The Age of Reason was responsible for making more people into infidels than any other book except the Bible."
— Gordon Stein

"When an honest but mistaken man learns of his error, he either [forthrightly] ceases to be mistaken, or ceases to be honest." — Peter E. Hendrickson

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"Religion is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance."
— Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors."
— Robert Owen, reformer and philanthropist

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others."
— Thomas Jefferson, in his Statute for Religious Freedom, saying government has no authority over one's religious opinions, thus defining "crime" as the injury of a person or his property

"It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by itself."
— Thomas Jefferson

"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."
— Thomas Jefferson

"In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

"Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs."
— Thomas Jefferson, when asked to issue an official prayer proclamation

"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself.  Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789

"Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind."
— Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822

"It is between fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac."
— Thomas Jefferson

"The Christian God is a being of terrific character — cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.  Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear. ...  Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences.  If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you"
— Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson's Works, Vol. II., p. 217

"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched.  Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion.  Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of REASON than that of BLINDFOLDED fear."
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to nephew Peter Carr, 1787

"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched.  Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion.  Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. . . . Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences.  If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find inducements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter (written from Paris) to nephew Peter Carr, 1787

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 1823

"The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it; and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right,from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine.  In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds.  It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams (January 24, 1814)

"I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives…  But this does not satisfy the priesthood.  They must have a positive, a declared assent to all of their interested absurdities.  My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest."
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Mrs. M. Harrison Smith, 1816

"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 political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander Humboldt, 1813

"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.  What has been the effect of coercion?  To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.  To support roguery and error all over the world."
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature.  They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology."
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Dr. Woods

"The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
— Thomas Jefferson

"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."
— Thomas Jefferson

You say you are a Calvinist.  I am not.  I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, June 25, 1819

"As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian.  I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, Oct. 31, 1819

"Let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.  Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself.  Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?  Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him?  Let history answer this question."
— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address

"To talk of immaterial existences, is to talk of nothings.  To say that the human soul, angels, God are immaterial is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul.  I cannot reason otherwise: ...  I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by [John] Locke."
— Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 15, 1820

"Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd U.S. President (1801-1809), letter to Danbury Baptists, 1802

"Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights.  Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself.  Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society."
— Thomas Jefferson

Note: Here are more Thomas Jefferson quotes on religion.

"The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of clergy."
— George Washington, 1st U.S. President

"Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause."
— George Washington

" ... happily the government of the United States ... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. ... Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."
— President George Washington, in a 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
— Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), from the Historical Review of Pennsylvania, which warns, among other things, that if we don't use the Liberty to hold and express our own religious opinions, even if out of the fear of reprisal, then we rightly forfeit that Liberty

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
— Benjamin Franklin

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible.  Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies."
— Benjamin Franklin, Toward The Mystery

"Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself."
— Benjamin Franklin, (Franklin's Autobiography, 1817–18)

"Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands … they produced an effect precisely the reverse to what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appeared to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself; in a word, I soon became a thorough Deist."
— Benjamin Franklin, (ibid.)

"The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason."
— Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1758

"Revealed religion has no weight with me."
— Benjamin Franklin

"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."
— Benjamin Franklin, quoted by Joseph Lewis in Benjamin Franklin - Freethinker

"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
— Benjamin Franklin, letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1790

"Do not, however, mistake me.  It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty.  On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that brought upon him the character of a heretic."
— Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, in Works, Vol. X, p.365

"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."
— Benjamin Franklin, Works, Vol. X', p. 323

"Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another."
— Benjamin Franklin

"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble."
— Benjamin Franklin, A Biography in his Own Words edited by Thomas Fleming, p. 404

"It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers."
— Priestley's Benjamin Franklin Biography, p. 60

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.  Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."
— John Adams

"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?"
— John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson

"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation.  But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?"
— John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816

"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross.  Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
— John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson

"What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy?  Remember the 'index expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine."
— John Adams, letter to John Taylor

"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.  And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY?  The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded.  But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes."
— John Adams, letter to John Taylor

"This is my religion . . . joy and exaltation in my own existence . . . so go ahead and snarl . . . bite . . . howl, you Calvinistic divines and all you who say I am no Christian.  I say you are not Christian."
— John Adams, Toward the Mystery

"[In regard to the Trinity]; "Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses, and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us that three was one . . . and one equals three, you and I would never have believed it.  We would never fall victims to such lies."
— John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson

"Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient Christianism, which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christian factions, above all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public?  Miracles after miracles have rolled down in torrents, wave succeeding wave in the Catholic church, from the Council of Nicea, and long before, to this day."
— John Adams, to Jefferson, 3 December 1813

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history.  Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity.  It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses...."
— John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America; from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society, p. 258

"Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion."
— John Adams

"The United States of America governments have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature.  It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
— John Adams

"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs.  This is the principal behind lotteries, dating and religion."
— Scott Adams, creator of "Dilbert"

"Have courage to use your own reason! - that is the motto of enlightenment."
— Emmanuel Kant

"Rational arguments do not work on religious people, otherwise there would be no religious people."
— Hugh Laurie’s character Dr. House, on the TV show "House"

"Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst."
— C.S. Lewis, noted Christian author

"Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?"
— Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900)

"After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands."
— Friedrich Nietzsche

"So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is Truth?"
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."
— Chapman Cohen

"All of science is built on territory once occupied by gods.  Is there some boundary at which science is supposed to stop?"
— Bob Parks, University of Maryland

"There is no god higher than truth."
— Mahatma Ghandi

"Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen."
— Michel de Montaigne

"Religion is all bunk."
— Thomas Edison

"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
— Thomas Edison

"I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul.  No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong.  It is born of our tenacity of life — our desire to go on living — our dread of coming to an end."
— Thomas Edison, in the "New York Times," 1910

"Ethical people will do what is right, no matter what they are told.  Religious people will do what they are told, no matter what is right."
— unknown

"There is but one evil, ignorance."
— Socrates

"The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."
— Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri, 973-1057 C.E., Syrian poet

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
— Galileo

"All my life I have made it a rule never to permit a religious man or woman take for granted that his or her religious beliefs deserved more consideration than non-religious beliefs or anti-religious ones.  I never agree with that foolish statement that I ought to respect the views of others when I believe them to be wrong."
— Chapman Cohen, The Creedo of Empowerment

"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
— W. K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief, An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism

"If you can tell me what to think, then I can tell you where to go."
— Unknown

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into."
— Jonathan Swift, author/theologian

"Those who get instructions directly from the Almighty are twice blessed.  They get their orders from the Highest Authority, and the orders are always to do what they would have done anyway."
— Harley Sorensen, SF Gate

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government."
— Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

"In contradiction to the Bible, the First Amendment to our Constitution gives us the right to worship gods (or not), work on Sunday (or not), and say what we wish about the various gods.  The Constitution, conceived by what may be the most brilliant and visionary group of men ever assembled, must take precedence over a book compiled by self-serving peoples of ancient cultures."
— David Miles, Orange Beach, AL

"ATHEIST is really a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term; it admits of no paltering and of no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech."
— Chapman Cohen

"I have the honesty to say I’m an Atheist.  There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God."
— Ernst Mayr, Harvard University, one of the most influential biologists in history

"On the other hand, famous evolutionists such as Dobzhansky were firm believers in a personal God.  He would work as a scientist all week and then on Sunday get down on his knees and pray to God.  Frankly I’ve never been able to understand it because you would need two totally different compartments in your brain, one that deals with religion and the other with everything else."
— Ernst Mayr

"Evolution ... is opportunistic, hence unpredictable."
— Ernst Mayr

"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears."
— Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

"Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion."
— Lemuel Washburn

"What a queer thing is Christian salvation!  Believing in firemen will not save a burning house; believing in doctors will not make one well, but believing in a savior saves men.  Fudge!"
— Lemuel Washburn

"When religion comes in at the door, common sense goes out at the window."
— Lemuel Washburn

"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."
— James Madison, Founding Father and author of the First Amendment, 1788

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial.  What has been its fruits?  More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
— James Madison - chief architect of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights

"Who does not see that the same authority, which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?"
— James Madison (1751-1836) 4th U.S. President (1809-1817) "A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," addressed to the Virginia General Assemby, 1785

"It degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority.  Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree."
— James Madison

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
— James Madison, letter to William Bradford, 1771

"Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history."
— James Madison, undated, Detached Memoranda

"The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of ... constitutional principles."
— James Madison, ibid.

"When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other passions is increased by the sympathy of a multitude.  But enthusiasm is only a temporary state of Religion, and whilst it lasts will hardly be seen with pleasure at the helm.  Even in its coolest state, it has been much oftener a motive to oppression than a restraint from it."
— James Madison

"A zeal for different opinions concerning religion...[has] divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good."
— James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Paper No. 10

"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…."
— James Madison, 1823

"When tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign foe."
— James Madison

"One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural."
— James D. Watson, Nobel laureate, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA

"It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we CAN imagine."
— J.B.S. Haldane

"Religion makes good people better and bad people worse."
— Christian theologian H. Richard Niebuhr

"One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious.  We should not retreat from this accomplishment."
— Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate physicist, A Designer Universe?

"On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful."
— Steven Weinberg, ibid.

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
— Steven Weinberg

"If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature."
— Steven Weinberg

"Religion is an insult to human dignity.  With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
— Steven Weinberg, in Freethought Today, April, 2000

Steven Weinberg also points to the self-righteous true believers who killed Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as to those Christians and Muslims who have used religion to defend slavery.

"There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism."
— Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

"Wherever science has not yet cast its illuminating light, the supernatural or metaphysical can and will always be unwrapped by some of us, to provide an explanation."
— Ronald Jenner, Postdoctoral Researcher, Marie Curie Fellow

"Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology.  Intelligent design is not a scientific concept."
— John H. Marburger III, Director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, in The New York Times, August 3, 2005

"We believe that intelligent design is neither sound science nor good theology."
The International Society for Science and Religion

"There is absolutely no scientific basis or evidence for 'intelligent design.'  It is simply a religious assertion, and it has no place in a science course."
— biologist David Hillis of the University of Texas

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
— H.L. Mencken

"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."
— H.L. Mencken

"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking."
— H.L. Mencken

"The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected."
— H.L. Mencken (American Mercury, March 1930)

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."
— H.L. Mencken (The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 11, 1955)

"The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore."
— H.L. Mencken (Minority Report, 1956)

"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable.  They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters."
— H.L. Mencken

Mencken's Creed