These quotes are gleaned from several sources on the net and from books that we own, however, we would like to acknowledge the two best databases on the web for atheist quotes, Celebrity Atheist List, and Positive Athesim's Big List of Quotations. Thank you to both of these sites for all your hard work and activism.

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• All places are alike, and every earth is fit for burial.

• Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd one self place; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there must we ever be.

• Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.

• I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

• Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion.
quoted from James A Haught, "Honest Minds, Past and Present" talk for History of Freethought conference Sept. 20-21, 1997, Cincinnati, Ohio sponsored by Council for Secular Humanism and Free Inquiry Group

• Religion! O Diabole!
Fie, I am asham'd, however that I seem,
To think a word of such simple sound,
Of such great matter should be made the ground.
the Duke of Guise, commenting on the misuse of religion as a source of power, in The Massacre of Paris, quoted from Jim Herrick, Against the Faith (1985), p. 30

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• In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 2

• Thrust your head into the public street, to gaze on Christian fools with varnish'd faces.
The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 5

• Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian.
Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 3

• His worst fault is, he's given to prayer; he is something peevish that way.
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 4

• I always thought it was both impious and unnatural that such immanity and bloody strife should reign among professors of one faith.
I Henry VI, Act 5, Scene I

• It is a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it.
The Winter's Tale, Act 2, Scene 3

• Modest doubt is call'd the beacon of the wise.
Troilus and Cressida, Act 2, Scene 2

• In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.
Hamlet, 1. 1

• And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons.
Hamlet, 1. 1

• All that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
Hamlet, 1. 2

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• Setting themselves against reason, as often as reason is against them.
Works (III, p. 91), (ed. 1839)

• No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Leviathan (pt. I, Of Man, ch. XVIII)

• Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, [is] religion; not allowed, superstition.
Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), quoted from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations

• Leisure is the mother of philosophy.

• No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact.
Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, i. vii. 30 (1651)

• A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing, and, as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous.
Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, xxix. (1651)

• Curiosity draws a man from consideration of the effect, to seek the cause.
Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, i. xi. 51. (1651)

• Silence is sometimes an argument of Consent.
Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, ii. xxvi. (1651)

• In a Democracy, look how many Demagogs [that is] how many powerful Orators there are with the people.
Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (1651), x. 6. 153

• Heresy is a word which, when it is used without passion, signifies a private opinion. So the different sects of the old philosophers, Academians, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, &c., were called heresies.
Behemoth; the History of the Civil Wars in England (1679)

• The best men are the least suspicious of fraudulent purposes.
Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, iv. xlvi. 379. (1651)

• I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
Thomas Hobbes' last words

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• Philosophy has no end in view, save truth. Faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

• Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

• The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak

• The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free

• I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion

• Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.

• If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

• I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God.
Epistles, 60

• Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds. Theological Political Treatise (1670), quoted from Laird Wilcox, ed., "The Degeneration of Belief"

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• All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.

• I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

• No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

• Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

• So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men most often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves. Credo, quia impossibile est: I believe, because it is impossible, might, in a good man, pass for a sally of zeal; but would prove a very ill rule for men to choose their opinions or religion by.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

• Faith is the assent to any proposition not made out by the deduction of reason but upon the credit of the proposer.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), quoted from Laird Wilcox, ed., "The Degeneration of Belief"

• The Church which taught men not to keep faith with heretics, had no claim to toleration.
from F H Perrycoste, Influence of Religion upon Truthfulness (p. 171); quoted from Joseph Lewis The Ten Commandments (p. 558)

• I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, it is a matter of faith, and above reason.

• New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
Essay on Human Understanding

• The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate.
from A Letter Concerning Toleration, quoted by Martha M McCarthy in A Delicate Balance: Church, State, and the Schools

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• I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

• Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

• It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

• Whenever an important event, a revolution, or a calamity turns to the profit of the church, such is always signalised as the Finger of God.
Philosophical Dictionary (1764), quoted from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations

• Custom, law bent my first years to the religion of the happy Muslims. I see it too clearly: the care taken of our childhood forms our feelings, our habits, our belief. By the Ganges I would have been a slave of the false gods, a Christian in Paris, a Muslim here.
Zaïre, in Mahomet, quoted from Jim Herrick, "Écrasez l'Infâme," in Against the Faith

• As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.
Philosophical Dictionary, quoted from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

• Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.
from Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World (1937) p. 766, quoted from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

• Christian: A good-natured, simple fellow; a true lamb of the fold, who, in the innocence of his heart, persuades himself that he firmly believes unbelievable things that his priests have told him to believe, especially those he cannot even imagine. Consequently, he is convinced that three x's make fifteen, that God was made man, that he was hanged and rose to life again, that priests cannot lie, and that all who do not believe in priests will be damned without remission.
Philosophical Dictionary, quoted from Chaz Bufe, The Devil's Dictionaries, "Introduction" (2004; 1992, 1995)

• The son of God is the same as the son of man; the son of man is the same as the son of God. God, the father, is the same as Christ, the son; Christ, the son, is the same as God, the father. This language may appear confused to unbelievers, but Christians will readily understand it.
quoted from John E Remsberg, The Christ

• Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed.

• Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.
Philosophical Dictionary, 1764

• The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning.
Philosophical Dictionary, 1764

• Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.
Philosophical Dictionary, 1764

• I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O, Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.
Letter to M. Damilaville / May 16, 1767

• I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.
Letter to d'Alembert / August 20, 1770

• Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy; the mad daughter of a wise mother

• It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

• Let us therefore reject all superstition in order to become more human; but in speaking against fanaticism, let us not imitate the fanatics: they are sick men in delirium who want to chastise their doctors. Let us assuage their ills, and never embitter them, and let us pour drop by drop into their souls the divine balm of toleration, which they would reject with horror if it were offered to them all at once.
Homélies prononcées à Londres, quoted from Jim Herrick, "Écrasez l'Infâme," in Against the Faith

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• To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.

• We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

• If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

• Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75.

• Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

• 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.
letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1780, quoted from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 93.

• The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle.
the incompatibility of faith and reason, Poor Richard's Almanack (1758)

• I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.
quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (2001)

• Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1743

• If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. These found it wrong in the bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.
An Essay on Toleration

• Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

• He [the Rev Mr. Whitefield] used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard.
from Franklin's Autobiography

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• Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous

• A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence

• Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

• I have written on all sorts of subjects . . . yet I have no enemies; except indeed all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.

• The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), quoted from Encarta® Book of Quotations (1999)

• Nothing is so convenient as a decisive argument ... which must at least silence the most arrogant bigotry and superstition, and free us from their impertinent solicitations. I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument ... which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 10(1), quoted from Antony Flew, Atheistic Humanism, p. 69

• A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.... Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happens in the common course of nature.... There must, therefore, be an uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as an uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

• When any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

• Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world, and you will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men's dreams.
quoted by James A Haught in "Honest Minds, Past and Present" Talks for History of Freethought Conference, September 20-21, 1997, Cincinnati, Ohio sponsored by Council for Secular Humanism and Free Inquiry Group

• I say then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. This variety of terms, which may seem so unphilosophical, is intended only to express that act of the mind, which renders realities, or what is taken for such, more present to us than fictions, causes them to weigh more in the thought, and gives them a superior influence on the passions and imagination.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section v, part ii (1748)

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• The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.

• The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
Treaty of Tripoly, article 11

• Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.

• 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?
Written in a letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816.

• 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 forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because of suspected heresy? Remember the Index Expurgato-rius, the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack! This is as bad, if not worse, than a slow fire. Nor should the Lion's Mouth be forgotten. Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years.
Written in a letter to John Taylor, 1814.

• 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.
Written in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815

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• Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance but the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.
The Rights of Man

• The study of theology, as it stands in the 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. Not anything
can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the
principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case
with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.
Submitted by Robert Umbehant

• He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression.
Dissertations on First Principles of Government (July 7, 1795), as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine

• An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
Dissertations on First Principles of Government (July 7, 1795), quoted from Laird Wilcox, ed., The Writer's Rights (2002) p. 31

• 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.
The Age of Reason (1794)

• I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The Age of Reason (1794), quoted from Laird Wilcox, ed., The Writer's Rights (2002) p. 31

• Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
The Rights of Man

• The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age, may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living, or the dead?
as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine

• Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin.
as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine

• A man will pass better through the world with a thousand open errors upon his back than in being detected in one sly falsehood. When one is detected, a thousand are suspected.
in a letter to George Washington (30 July 1796) discussing Paine's service to America, as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine

• The character which Mr. Washington has attempted to act in the world is a sort of nondescribable, chameleon-colored thing called prudence. It is, in many cases, a substitute for principle, and is so nearly allied to hypocrisy that it easily slides into it. His genius for prudence furnished him in this instance with an expedient that served, as is the natural and general character of all expedients, to diminish the embarrassments of the moment and multiply them afterwards; for he authorized it to be made known to the French Government, as a confidential matter (Mr. Washington should recollect that I was a member of the Convention, and had the means of knowing what I here state), he authorized it, I say, to be announced, and that for the purpose of preventing any uneasiness to France on the score of Mr. Jay's mission to England, that the object of that mission, and of Mr. Jay's authority, was restricted to that of demanding the surrender of the western posts, and indemnification for the cargoes captured in American vessels.
Mr. Washington knows that this was untrue; and knowing this, he had good reason to himself for refusing to furnish the House of Representatives with copies of the instructions given to Jay, as he might suspect, among other things, that he should also be called upon for copies of instructions given to other Ministers, and that, in the contradiction of instructions, his want of integrity would be detected. Mr. Washington may now, perhaps, learn, when it is too late to be of any use to him, that a man will pass better through the world with a thousand open errors upon his back than in being detected in one sly falsehood. When one is detected, a thousand are suspected.
in a letter to George Washington (30 July 1796) discussing Paine's service to America, as excerpted from Daniel Edwin Wheeler, ed., Life and Writings of Thomas Paine

• Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
The Rights of Man: Being An Answer To Mr. Burke's Attack On The French Revolution, Part the First, Conclusion

• When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.
as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine

• It is always to be taken for granted, that those who oppose an equality of rights never mean the exclusion should take place on themselves.
as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine

• When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.
The Rights of Man

• I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
The Age of Reason

• To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.
The Crisis

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• 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.
Written in 1787 in a letter to his nephew

• Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.
Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-82.

• What all agree upon is probably right; what no two agree in most probably is wrong.
Jefferson's Axiom, in a letter to John Adams, 11 January 1817, quoted from Lester Cappon, ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters (1959) p. 445

• 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.
Reply to Baptist Address, 1807

• From the dissensions among Sects themselves arise necessarily a right of choosing and necessity of deliberating to which we will conform. But if we choose for ourselves, we must allow others to choose also, and so reciprocally, this establishes religious liberty.
Notes on Religion, 1776.

• The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. 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.
Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-82.

• Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.
Notes on Virginia, 1782.

• I know it will give great offense to the clergy, but the advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from them.
Written to Levi Lincoln, 1802

• Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
We have solved ... the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.
to the Virginia Baptists (1808). This is his second use of the term "wall of separation," here quoting his own use in the Danbury Baptist letter. This wording was several times upheld by the Supreme Court as an accurate description of the Establishment Clause: Reynolds (98 US at 164, 1879); Everson (330 US at 59, 1947); McCollum (333 US at 232, 1948)

• [N]o man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779), quoted from Merrill D Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (1984), p. 347

• I am for freedom of religion, & against all maneuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.
letter to Elbridge Gerry, 1799

• I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.
letter to Edward Dowse, April 19, 1803

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Click here for a page of letters and writings by Thomas Jefferson

• Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.
April 1, 1774

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• It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science.

• When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
The Origin of Species

• What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature.

• When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
Quoted from Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), chapter 1, "Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory," p. 1 (the bracketed translation is Gould's)

• I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.
Descent of Man

• 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.
Introduction to The Descent of Man

• False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
Descent of Man

• How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.
Descent of Man p. 122

• I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.
Descent of Man p. 612

• I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower from, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.
Descent of Man p. 613

• But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.

• The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
Life and Letters, cited in Peter's Quotations, by Lawrence J Peter (1977), p. 45, quoted from James A Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996)

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• The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
Eight Years and More (1898), p. 26

• I can truly say that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed, and the gloom connected with everything associated with the name of religion.
quoted from Thomas S Vernon, Great Infidels, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.
quoted from Free Thought Magazine (Sept. 1896)

• I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.
Eight Years and More (1898), p. 395

• Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.
from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to woman is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.
Free Thought magazine (November, 1896), quoted from Freedom From Religion Foundation, "What They Said About Religion" (Nontract #4)

• All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example.
from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• The Pentateuch makes woman a mere afterthought in creation; the author of sin; cursed in her maternity; a subject in marriage; and claims divine authority for this fourfold bondage, this wholesale desecration of the mothers of the race. While some admit that this invidious language of the Old Testament is disparaging to woman, they claim that the New Testament honors her. But the letters of the apostles to the churches, giving directions for the discipline of women, are equally invidious, as the following texts prove:
"Wives, obey your husbands. If you would know anything, ask your husbands at home. Let your women keep silence in the churches, with their heads covered. Let not your women usurp authority over the man, for as Christ is the head of the church so is the man the head of the woman. Man was prior in creation, the woman was of the man, therefore shall she be in subjection to him."
No symbols or metaphors can twist honor or dignity out of such sentiments. Here, in plain English, woman's position is as degraded as in the Old Testament.
from the pamphlet "Bible and Church Degrade Woman," Free Thought Magazine (1896), quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, pp. 124-5

• Well, another female child is born into the world! Last Sunday afternoon, Harriot Eaton Stanton -- oh! the little heretic thus to desecrate that holy holiday -- opened her soft blue eyes on this mundane sphere.
in "an impish letter of joy to Susan B Anthony on the arrival of her 'little heretic,' her second and last daughter, Harriot" (January 24, 1856), quoted from and citation note by Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 106

• Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.
from Charles Q Bufe, ed., The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations: Cutting Comments on Burning Issues, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.
from the pamphlet "Bible and Church Degrade Woman," Free Thought Magazine (1896), quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 125

• How can any woman believe that a loving and merciful God would, in one breath, command Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, and in the next, pronounce a curse upon her maternity? I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or gave out the laws about women which he is accused of doing.
from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brain of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of "thus saith the Lord."
quoted from Thomas S Vernon, Great Infidels, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch.... I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.
Eight Years and More, ch. 24 (1898), p. 395

• The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.
from Laird Wilcox and John George, eds., Be Reasonable: Selected Quotations for Inquiring Minds, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.
quoted from Dr. Mynga Futrell, "The Ladies Clamor for Change"

• I often saw weary little women coming to the table after most exhausting labors, and large, bumptious husbands spreading out their hands and thanking the Lord for the meals that the dear women had prepared, as if the whole came down like manna from heaven. So I preached a sermon in the blessing I gave. You will notice that it has three heresies in it: "Heavenly Father and Mother, make us thankful for all the blessings of this life, and make us ever mindful of the patient hands that oft in weariness spread our tables and prepare our daily food. For humanity's sake, Amen."
upon overcoming her discomfort over being asked to say "grace," Stanton began using the opportunity to preach equality, while traveling under frontier conditions as a suffrage organizer and on the Lyceum circuit, lecturing for as many as five consecutive months a year for more than a decade, in Alma Lutz, Created Equal (1940), p. 201, quoted from and citation notes by Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 106

• I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals -- grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to an unknown god.
from her diary, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• For years many a thinking people have had gloomy forebodings as to the result of the immense power of the church in our political affairs.... And the first step in the disestablishment of the church & of all churches is the taxation of church property. The government has no right to tax infidels for everything that takes the name of religion. For every dollar of church property untaxed, all other properties must be taxed one dollar more, and thus the poor man's home bears the burden of maintaining costly edifices from which he & his family are as effectively excluded -- as though a policeman stood to bar their entrance, and in smaller towns all sects are building, building, building, not a little town in the western prairies but has its three & four churches & this immense accumulation of wealth is all exempt from taxation. In the new world as well as the old these rich ecclesiastical corporations are a heavy load on the shoulders of the people, for what wealth escapes, the laboring masses are compelled to meet. If all the church property in this country were taxed, in the same ratio poor widows are to day, we could soon roll off the national debt....
The clergy of all sects are universally opposed to free thought & free speech, & if they had the power even in our republic to day would crush any man who dared to question the popular religion.
unidentified lecture fragment about taxation of church property (1877?), quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, pp. 141-2

• I found in this new friend a woman emancipated from all faith in manmade creeds, from all fear of his denunciations. Nothing was too sacred for her to question, as to its rightfulness in principle and practice.... It seemed to me like meeting a being from some larger planet, to find a woman who dared to question the opinions of Popes, Kings, Synods, Parliaments, with the same freedom that she would criticize an editorial in the London Times, recognizing no higher authority than the judgment of a pure-minded educated woman. When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves the earth.
"I Had the Same Right to Think," quoted from The History of Woman Suffrage, vol I, p. 422

• I have endeavoured to dissipate these religious superstitions from the minds of women, and base their faith on science and reason, where I found for myself at last that peace and comfort I could never find in the Bible and the church.... The less they believe, the better for their own happiness and development....
For fifty years the women of this nation have tried to dam up this deadly stream that poisons all their lives, but thus far they have lacked the insight or courage to follow it back to its source and there strike the blow at the fountain of all tyranny, religious superstition, priestly power, and the canon law.
"The Degraded Status of Woman in the Bible" (1896), quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 103

• Women are afraid. It is unpopular to question the bible. They are creatures of tradition. They fear to question their position in the testament, as they feared to advocate suffrage fifty years ago. Now they are quarreling as to which were among the first to advocate it.
You see they are not used to abuse as I am. In Albany, fifty years ago, when I went before the legislature to plead for a married woman's right to her own property, the women whom I met in society crossed the street rather than speak to me.
Interview, Chicago Record (June 29, 1897), quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 105

• These teachings in regard to woman so faithfully reflect the provisions of the canon law that it is fair to infer that their inspiration came from the same source, written by men, translated by men, revised by men. If the Bible is to be placed in the hands of our children, read in our schools, taught in our theological seminaries, proclaimed as God’s law in our temples of worship, let us by all means call a council of women in New York, and give it one more revision from the woman’s standpoint.
quoted from Dr. Mynga Futrell, "The Ladies Clamor for Change"

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