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"

• It is through the perversion of the religious element in woman, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life with all its high duties in abeyance to that which is to come, that she and the children she has trained have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition.
quoted from Dr. Mynga Futrell, "The Ladies Clamor for Change"

• As women are taking an active part in pressing on the consideration of Congress many narrow sectarian measures, such as more rigid Sunday laws, the stopping of travel, the distribution of the mail on that day, and the introduction of the name of God into the Constitution; and as this action on the part of some women is used as an argument for the disfranchisement of all, I hope this convention will declare that the Woman Suffrage Association is opposed to all union of Church and State, and pledges itself as far as possible to maintain the secular nature of our Government.
warning suffragists not to capitalize on Frances Willard's suffrage help through the Women's Christian Temperance Union, at her opening speech at the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention of 1890, from The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. iv, p. 166, quoted from and citation notes by Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 110

• The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire.... Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.

• Whatever oppressions man has suffered, they have invariably fallen more heavily on woman. Whatever new liberties advancing civilization has brought to man, ever the smallest measure has been accorded to woman, as a result of church teaching. The effect of this is seen in every department of life.
quoted from Dr. Mynga Futrell, "The Ladies Clamor for Change"

• One remarkable fact stands out in the history of witchcraft; and that is, its victims were chiefly women. Scarce one wizard to a hundred witches was ever burned or tortured.
"The Christian Church and Woman," from the Index, Boston, ca. 1888. This is a version of "Woman's Position in the Christian Church," a sermon originally delivered in Moncure D Conway's Pulpit, South Place Chapel, London, September 1882. A longer version appeared in The Boston Investigator, May 18, 1901. A slightly shorter version was included in the pamphlet "Bible and Church Degrade Woman," quoted from and citation notes by Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 116

• All through the centuries, scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.
quoted from Thomas S Vernon, Great Infidels, quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• I can say that the happiest period of my life has been since I emerged from the shadows and superstitions of the old theologies, relieved from all gloomy apprehensions of the future, satisfied that as my labors and capacities were limited to this sphere of action, I was responsible for nothing beyond my horizon, as I could neither understand nor change the condition of the unknown world. Giving ourselves, then, no trouble about the future, let us make the most of the present, and fill up our lives with earnest work here.
from "The Pleasures of Age," published by The Boston Investigator (February 2, 1901), quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 111

• How anyone, in view of the protracted sufferings of the race, can invest the laws of the universe with a tender loving fatherly intelligence, watching, guiding and protecting humanity, is to me amazing.
letter to Henry Stanton (August 2, 1880), quoted from from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

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• I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

• I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the WS platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon.

• What you should say to outsiders is that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it.
Susan B Anthony: A Biography, by Kathleen Barry, New York University Press, 1988, p.310

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• The injustice of man towards woman under the laws of both Church and State engrafted upon society, have resulted in many evils unsuspected by the world, which if known would strike it with amazement and terror.

• In the name of religion, the worst crimes against humanity have ever been perpetrated.

• Woman desires freedom in order to become what she has the innate power of becoming. She is a living growing organism as much as is a tree, and like that tree, she needs room and freedom. A tree planted close beside a stone wall, cannot grow upon the side next to the wall. Sunshine and air may meet it upon the opposite side, its branches may put forth in one direction, but the stone wall prevents its becoming a tree of symmetrical proportions.

• People demand the overthrow of those restrictions which press the hardest upon them.

• In each of these three institutions every human being has an interest, and a natural right to assist in framing. Those three institutions, family, society, and government are his only three sources of life, of happiness, and of liberty in this world.

• We may look forward with an eye of prescience and in the remote future see a time when human governments shall have come to an end, but our duty lies not in the contemplation of that happy period. We belong to a period of the world's struggle; our opportunities and our duties lie with the world as we find it, and women as human beings have inherent rights to share in all the duties of the world, in all methods of the world's progress, because in these duties, in these methods, lie developing powers.

• Woman is a glorious possibility, the youngest-born of God's creatures, the Benjamin of life, the future of the world is hers.
Autograph Book, 21 February 1882

• The world is now full of subjects to compel great thoughts. Woman's experiences broaden, deepen, embolden her. She sees life as never before:- as never before she dares to be herself. The progress of life is a growth headward; as the spirit brain increases, morality increases and humanity becomes more free. True civilization is a recognition of the rights of others at every point of contact, and when this takes place the world will step out of the darkness of heathendom into a full light of a religious and political civilization grander than any of which it has yet dreamed.
"The Foundation of Sovereignty," The Woman's Tribune. April 1887

• While so much is said of the inferior intellect of woman, it is by a strange absurdity conceded that very many eminent men owe their station in life to their mothers.

• To those who fancy we are near the end of the battle or that the reformer's path is strewn with roses, we may say them nay. The thick of the fight has just begun; the hottest part of the warfare is yet to come, and those who enter it must be willing to give up father, mother and comforts for its sake. Neither shall we who carry on the fight, reap the great reward. We are battling for the good of those who shall come after us; they, not ourselves, shall enter into the harvest.
Final Editorial, National Citizen and Ballot Box, 1881.

• The policy of the church from the moment of her existence has been universal dominion over the lives, property, and thought of mankind. The threads of life mingle like broth in the Witches Cauldron, from many a diverse source.

• Once possessor of a name but now by virtue of a few words, merely an auxiliary to her reverend husband

• Money causes people to be interested in each other

• He took me to one house, a ministers, I didn't like things a bit. They felt grand, kept three servants, black ones, too, and had a great dinner after meeting. Those colored folks had staid home and cooked it. I didn't think it was right. They had carpets you couldn't hear your feet on, and pictures that looked like birds sitting in them. It was all very grand and fine but I didn't feel at home. He had borrowed money of Mr. Sniffles and so he wanted to use him well. He never paid it though. I suppose there are good folks in New York but I'd rather be home with ma.

• She had lived and breathed and thought and acted as directed by father and mother all these years, and now her father was dead and she was left under sole charge and direction of her mother. Her mother, did I say? A selfish tyrant, rather, to whom she was bound by those ties most binding to people trained as this girl had been. Affection, obedience, control of her will, all in the name of duty and religion.

• Hannah was old, that kind of age that depends not upon years but causes people to lose all interest in life. Like a parasite her mother drew all the juices of youth and happiness from her daughter. If God's justice and mercy extends not farther across the border than theologians teach, how worse than wretched the fate of myriad millions who on earth longed for simple happiness, happiness so simple that it should be common to all as the air they breathe.

• (Catherine the Second) I propose to glance for a brief hour, at the history of one of the most remarkable women that ever lived. The events of a life always possess a peculiar fascination. The hopes, the fears, the joys, the sorrows, the loves and hatreds of the most obscure person, when spread before us, at once enlist our attention, and have for us an absorbing interest, for here we seek new revelations of the mysteries of life; and an acquaintance with the condition and surroundings of the commonest (one) person, may give us a knowledge of all that person's country was at the time they lived.

• The events of a life always possess a peculiar fascination. The hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows, the loves and hatreds, and ambitions, of the most obscure person, when open before us, at once enlist our attention, and have (possess) for us an absorbing interest, for here we seek new revelations of the mysteries of life; and a knowledge of the conditions and surroundings, of one person may give to us a perception of all that person's country was at the time they lived.

• It is no less true mentally and physically, than morally, that a parent's sins are visited upon their children to the third and fourth generation. Every man lives again in the race. His successors are but modified editions of himself. To judge how much our acts will influence the future, we must look back and see what influence the past had had upon us. We are measurably what our fathers and mothers were, our children will measurably be what we have been.

• (death:) Even the cricket was still. The frosts of approaching winter had hushed his song. He was dead, and all nature, too, seemed dying; but faith said there is a summer beyond. These sleep now, but by and by they will awaken again. I looked at the mounds about me and faith again whispered, "These are not dead, they but sleep! There is a summer beyond where friends meet again."
"Letter from Mrs. Gage", Daily Standard, 18 Nov. 1871

• (revivals:) American revivals, as a noticeable fact, occur in the winter months, when people are less busy with pressing work for the body, and are upon the lookout for excitement. Revivals have in them that element of emotional exaltation so unconsciously sought by this age and this people.
"Washington Gossip," NY Evening Post, 12 Feb. 1876

• Sympathetic contagion, generally connected with some religious feeling, never has force where the intellect is scientifically and philosophically cultivated, and active. It belongs to an age, or a phase of ignorance and religious superstition. The crusades dragged thousands from home to engage in a war for wresting the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks. For three centuries, imagining they were doing God's service, men were afflicted with that superstitious madness till even children entered it, and thousands of boys and girls from ten to fourteen years of age, led by one of their own companions, marched despite parents and magistrates, on this same mad errand. Moral contagion as a law of life, has never yet received its due consideration. From such instances as have been mentioned, one can well see how Bishop Butler came to suggest his famous idea of the insanity of whole communities. He deemed many incidents of history unexplainable on any other grounds. Delusions seem to be capable of communicating themselves and fastening with a very tenacious hold upon the imagination. During the witchcraft delusion, many persons voluntarily accused themselves of its practice. At the time of the Tarantula mania, which raged in the south of Europe during the fifteenth century, whole companies of the afflicted, hand in hand, sang and danced themselves voluntarily into the sea and were drowned. Suicide, crime, and even accidents put on a contagious form. No stranger fact exists in the religious history of the world, than the rise and spread of the Mormon delusion in this country. The one man power, contrary to the instincts of our government, swelling in the space of thirty years from nothing to one hundred thousand; the deeper depths of woman's degradation, hand in hand, with this autocracy, furnish a problem whose cause is for the philosophers to elucidate.
"The Woman's Anti-Whiskey Crusade," The Golden Age, 21 March 1874

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• Some heathens whose Idol was greatly weatherworn threw it into a river, and erecting a new one, engaged in public worship at its base.
"What is this all about?" inquired the New Idol.
"Father of Joy and Gore," said the High Priest, "be patient and I will instruct you in the doctrines and rites of our holy religion."
A year later, after a course of study in theology, the Idol asked to be thrown into the river, declaring himself an atheist.
"Do not let that trouble you," said the High Priest -- "so am I"
"Two Sceptics," Fantastic Fables

• Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.
Collected Works (1912)

• Nothing is more logical than persecution. Religious tolerance is a kind of infidelity.
Collected Works (1912), quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumption and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure.
Collected Works (1912), quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• Camels and Christians receive their burdens kneeling.
quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.

• A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

• Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.

Aborigines, n.: Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

• Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

• Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

• Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

• Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

• Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

• Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

• All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

• Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.

• An egotist is a person of low taste-more interested in himself than in me.

• Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.

• Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.

• Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

• Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.

• Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

• Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

• Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

• Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

• Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

• Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

• Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

• Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

• Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.

• Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

• Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

• Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.

• Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum - I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.

• Confidante. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.

• Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

• Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon

• Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.

• Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.

• Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

• Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.

• Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.

• Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

• Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.

• Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.

• Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.

• Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.

• Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.

• Doubt is the father of invention.

• Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.

• Education, n.: That which discloses the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

• Egotism, n: Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.

• Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.

• Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

• Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

• Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

• Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.

• Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.

• Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happinesss is assured.

• Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

• Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

• History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

• Honorable, adj.: Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur."

• I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.

• I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers. What I said was that all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

• Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.

• In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.

• In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

• Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

• It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.

• Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.

• Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

• Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

• Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

• Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

• Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

• Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

• Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.

• Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion.

• Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

• Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

• Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.

• Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

• Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.

• Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.

• Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

• Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.

• Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

• Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

• Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

• Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.

• Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

• Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

• Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

• Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

• Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

• Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

• Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

• Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

• Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

• Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

• Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.

• Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.

• Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized.

• Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.

• Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

• The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.

• The covers of this book are too far apart.

• The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

• The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.

• The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.

• There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.

• To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.

• Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

• War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

• We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.

• We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.

• What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

• When you doubt, abstain.

• Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

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• Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.
The Birth of Tragedy, p.23, Walter Kaufmann transl.

• As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
Human, all too Human, s.118, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

• As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former.
Human, all too Human, s.122, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

• A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape--I mean one over which the gloomy and sublime thunder cloud of the wrathful Yahweh was brooding continually. Only here was the rare and sudden piercing of the gruesome and perpetual general day-night by a single ray of the sun experienced as if it were a miracle of "love" and the ray of unmerited "grace." Only here could Jesus dream of his rainbow and his ladder to heaven on which God descended to man. Everywhere else good weather and sunshine were considered the rule and everyday occurrences.
The Gay Science, s.137, Walter Kaufmann transl

• All the world still believes in the authorship of the "Holy Spirit" or is at least still affected by this belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for "edification."... That it also tells the story of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive of souls, of a head as superstitious as it was crafty, the story of the apostle Paul--who knows this , except a few scholars? Without this strange story, however, without the confusions and storms of such a head, such a soul, there would be no Christianity...
That the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast, that it went, and was able to go, among the pagans--that was due to this one man, a very tortured, very pitiful, very unpleasant man, unpleasant even to himself. He suffered from a fixed idea--or more precisely, from a fixed, ever-present, never-resting question: what about the Jewish law? and particularly the fulfillment of this law? In his youth he had himself wanted to satisfy it, with a ravenous hunger for this highest distinction which the Jews could conceive - this people who were propelled higher than any other people by the imagination of the ethically sublime, and who alone succeeded in creating a holy god together with the idea of sin as a transgression against this holiness. Paul became the fanatical defender of this god and his law and guardian of his honor; at the same time, in the struggle against the transgressors and doubters, lying in wait for them, he became increasingly harsh and evilly disposed towards them, and inclined towards the most extreme punishments. And now he found that--hot-headed, sensual, melancholy, malignant in his hatred as he was-- he was himself unable to fulfill the law; indeed, and this seemed strangest to him, his extravagant lust to domineer provoked him continually to transgress the law, and he had to yield to this thorn.
Is it really his "carnal nature" that makes him transgress again and again? And not rather, as he himself suspected later, behind it the law itself, which must constantly prove itself unfulfillable and which lures him to transgression with irresistable charm? But at that time he did not yet have this way out. He had much on his conscience - he hints at hostility, murder, magic, idolatry, lewdness, drunkenness, and pleasure in dissolute carousing - and... moments came when he said to himself:"It is all in vain; the torture of the unfulfilled law cannot be overcome."... The law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed: how he hated it! how he searched for some means to annihilate it--not to fulfill it any more himself!
And finally the saving thought struck him,... "It is unreasonable to persecute this Jesus! Here after all is the way out; here is the perfect revenge; here and nowhere else I have and hold the annihilator of the law!"... Until then the ignominious death had seemed to him the chief argument against the Messianic claim of which the new doctrine spoke: but what if it were necessary to get rid of the law?
The tremendous consequences of this idea, of this solution of the riddle, spin before his eyes; at one stroke he becomes the happiest man; the destiny of the Jews--no, of all men--seems to him to be tied to this idea, to this second of its sudden illumination; he has the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, the light of lights; it is around him that all history must revolve henceforth. For he is from now on the teacher of the annihilation of the law...
This is the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity. Until then there were only a few Jewish sectarians.
Daybreak, s.68, Walter Kaufmann transl.

• Paul thought up the idea and Calvin rethought it, that for innumerable people damnation has been decreed from eternity, and that this beautiful world plan was instituted to reveal the glory of God: heaven and hell and humanity are thus supposed to exist - to satisfy the vanity of God! What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up first, or second. Paul has remained Saul after all - the persecutor of God.
The Wanderer and his Shadow, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

• If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.
Human, all too Human, s.116, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

• The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse origin, and that is why it is so capable of proselytizing: it always could, and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found, and always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning. It is not what is Christian in it, but the universal heathen character of its usages, which has favored the spread of this world-religion; its ideas, rooted in both the Jewish and the Hellenic worlds, have from the first known how to raise themselves above national and racial niceties and exclusiveness as though these were merely prejudices. One may admire this power of causing the most various elements to coalesce, but one must not forget the contemptible quality that adheres to this power: the astonishing crudeness and self-satisfiedness of the church's intellect during the time it was in process of formation, which permitted it to accept any food and to digest opposites like pebbles.
Daybreak,s. 70, R.J. Hollingdale transl

• Christianity possesses the hunters instinct for all those who can by one means or another be brought to despair - of which only a portion of mankind is capable. It is constantly on their track, it lies in wait for them. Pascal attempted the experiment of seeing whether, with the aid of the most incisive knowledge, everyone could not be brought to despair: the experiment miscarried, to his twofold despair.
Daybreak,s. 64, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

• The reverse side of Christian compassion for the suffering of one's neighbor is a profound suspicion of all the joy of one's neighbor, of his joy in all that he wants to do and can.
Daybreak,s. 80, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

• Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature- is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
Daybreak,s. 89, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

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• Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
The Critic as Artist (1891)

• The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.
Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist, pt. 2 (Intentions, 1891)

• Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.
from Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde (1918)

• Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods – Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.
"The Soul of Man under Socialism," in the Fortnightly Review, (1891), quoted from James A Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

• When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

• The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.
from Laird Wilcox and John George, eds., Be Reasonable: Selected Quotations for Inquiring Minds

• The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.
"Lecture Delivered to the Art Students of the Royal Academy, June 30 1883," in Essays and Lectures (1908)

• Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

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• Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

• If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

• Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

• Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
The Future of an Illusion

• At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
Totem and Taboo

• In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
The Future of an Illusion

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• The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done.
"The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913

• I was called before the head matron, a tall woman with a stolid face. She began taking my pedigree. "What religion?" was the first question. "None, I am an atheist." "Atheism is prohibited here. You will have to go to church." I replied that I would do nothing of the kind. I did not believe in anything the Church stood for and, not being a hypocrite, I would not attend.
having been sentenced to Blackwell's Island for a year for saying, at a mass rally at Union Square, "If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!" Quoted in Living My Life, p. 133, quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 382.

• I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made.
speaking from a Detroit pulpit in 1898, quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 382

• How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• Emma Goldman, Mug Shot: Septermber 1, 1893, City of Philadelphia ArchivesMankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder: Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon earth.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of the people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• There are ... some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry -- the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.
speaking from a Detroit pulpit in 1898, quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 382

• The burden of all song and praise "unto the Highest" has been that God stands for justice and mercy. Yet injustice among men is ever on the increase; the outrages committed against the masses in this country alone would seem enough to overflow the very heavens. But where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He, deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself, must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partiy with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.
The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.
"The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913

• "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven."
The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder....
Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to such sickening artificial love. Not because of any reward does a free spirit take his stand for a great truth, nor has such a one ever been deterred because of fear of punishment.
"The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913

• Emma Goldman, sppeaking in 1919 (cropped from Library of Congress photo LC-USZ62-20178)Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day.... The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.
"The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913

• Atheism ... in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• So weak and helpless was this "Savior of Men" that he must needs the whole human family to pay for him, unto all eternity, because he "hath died for them." Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.
Thousands of martyrs have perished, yet few, if any, of them have proved so helpless as the great Christian God. Thousands have gone to their death with greater fortitude, with more courage, with deeper faith in their ideas than the Nazarene. Nor did they expect eternal gratitude from their fellow-men because of what they endured for them.
Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists, Francisco Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a poor figure indeed. Compared with the delicate, frail Spiridonova who underwent the most terrible tortures, the most horrible indignities, without losing faith in herself or her cause, Jesus is a veritable nonentity. They stood their ground and faced their executioners with unflinching determination, and though they, too, died for the people, they asked nothing in return for their great sacrifice.
"The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913

• It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
"Victims of Morality," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, March, 1913

• The abuses of Christianity, like the abuses of government, are conditioned in the thing itself, and are not to be charged to the representatives of the creed. Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.
"The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913

• I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and others refuted that myth long ago. I am even ready to admit that the theological Christ is not half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ. In proportion as science takes the place of blind faith, theology loses its hold. But the ethical and poetical Christ-myth has so thoroughly saturated our lives that even some of the most advanced minds find it difficult to emancipate themselves from its yoke. They have rid themselves of the letter, but have retained the spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all the crimes and horrors committed by orthodox Christianity. The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every [in]dignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.
"The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913

• The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond.
"The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916

• Imagine, capitalist America also divides the anarchists into two categories, philosophic and criminal. The first are accepted in highest circles; one of them is even high in the councils of the Wilson Administration. The second category, to which we have the honor of belonging, is persecuted and often imprisoned. Yours also seems to be a distinction without a difference. Don't you think so?
to Lenin, responding to his claim that "We do have bandits in prison, and Makhnovtsy, but no ideiny anarchists," quoted from Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life

• Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
words for which she was sent to prison, according to Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 382

• Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage? Free love? As if love is anything but free!
"Marriage and Love" published in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911)

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Albert Einstein

• Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

• Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

• I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

• Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

• The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

• If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?
My Later Years

• If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

• I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

• A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Religion and Science, New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930

• The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
The World as I See It

• A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. • I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

• I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

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• The Institutional Church (ecclesia) has killed only two kinds of people: Those who do not believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and those who do.

• Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

• It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

• Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. . . . From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgment, and ... reward and punishment.

• I am still an agnostic, with pantheistic overtones. The sight of plants and children growing inclines me to define divinity as creative power, and to reverence this in all its manifestations, even when they injure me. I cannot reconcile the existence of consciousness with a deterministic and mechanistic philososphy. I am skeptical not only of theology but also of philosophy, science, history, and myself. I recognize supersensory possibilities but not supernatural powers.

• I felt more keenly than before the need of a philosophy that would do justice to the infinite vitality of nature. In the inexhaustible activity of the atom, in the endless resourcefulness of plants, in the teeming fertility of animals, in the hunger and movement of infants, in the laughter and play of children, in the love and devotion of youth, in the restless ambition of fathers and the lifelong sacrifice of mothers, in the undiscourageable researches of scientists and the sufferings of genius, in the crucifixion of prophets and the martyrdom of saints — in all things I saw the passion of life for growth and greatness, the drama of everlasting creation. I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process.

• What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

• A certain tension between religion and society marks the highest stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion" Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and -- after some hesitation -- the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike, to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end, a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile, among the oppressed, another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.

• These church steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope, these lofty city spires, or simple chapels in the hills -- they rise at every step from the earth toward the sky; in every village of every nation they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know. But as long as man suffers, these steeples will remain.

Ezra Pound

• Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

• A heroic figure ... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him.
describing Jesus Christ, to the father of Pound's bride-to-be, Dorothy Shakespear, explaining his reasons for not wanting a church wedding, in: Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character, pt. 2, ch. 13 (1988), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

• A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

• A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

• A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

• And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

• Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

• As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

• But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

• Either move or be moved.

• Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

• Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

• Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

• Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

• I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

• I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.

• I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic - I mean my motion.

• I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

• If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

• If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

• It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

• Literature is news that stays news.

• Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

• Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

• No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

• Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

• People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

• Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

• Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

• The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

• The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voila une chose! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voila une chose!

• The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

• There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.

• There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.

• There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, "It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune."

• 'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!

• Wars are made to make debt.

• When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

• When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder.

<TOP>

• A precept claiming infallibility should certainly possess the universality of the law of gravitation and the perfection of the arithmetical table. If it fails to possess these undeviating qualities, its imperfection is self-evident and its value either greatly diminished or useless.
from The Ten Commandments ("The Seventh Commandment" -- page 457)

• Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter closed?
from The Philosophy of Atheism

• If Atheism writes upon the blackboard of the Universe a question mark, it writes it for the purpose of stating that there is a question yet to be answered. Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved? Does not the word "God" only confuse and make more difficult the solution by assuming a conclusion that is utterly groundless and palpably absurd?
from The Philosophy of Atheism

• Facts and not merely opinions are what we want. Emotionalism is not a substitute for the truth.
from The Philosophy of Atheism

• Man's inhumanity to man will continue as long as man loves God more than he loves his fellow man.
from An Atheist Manifesto

• I do not believe that if there is a God of this vast universe that such a God would create a hell to torment to all eternity helpless and innocent human beings. I defend the God of the religionists against the libels of his own believers.
answer to preacher Jack Coe

• As superstition is the weed of the brain, it grows perfusely, once started.
The Ten Commandments (page 202)

• Praying as a public function, particularly when led by a clergyman, is a vulgar display of an exclusively personal matter.
"Ingersoll the Magnificent" (Memorial Dedication Address, August 11, 1954)

• Of the ten crimes which Biblical Hebrew law punished by stoning, nine have ceased to be offenses in modern society.
from The Ten Commandments ("The Eighth Commandment")

• Imagine using as an authority in the matter of marriage the opinion of a celibate priest!
from The Philosophy of Atheism

• When the tyranny of the state is combined with the hypocrisy of the church, you have a modern example of the twin vultures that have devoured man, and his rights, throughout the ages.
"Ingersoll the Magnificent" (Memorial Dedication Address, August 11, 1954)

• On too many occasions, especially in matters concerning purported conversations and messages from gods, mystery has been employed by charlatans to hoodwink the people.
The Ten Commandments, p. 4

• Changing a rod into a serpent and the serpent back into a rod may be clever magic, but how does such a demonstration prove that Moses spoke to God? If the only thing necessary to prove the truth of an extraordinary claim were to demonstrate an ability to bewilder, there would be no more mysteries to solve.
• If a person claims that he can bring the dead back to life, and in proof of that power pulls a rabbit out of a hat, that is hardly a demonstration of the truth of his claim; it is merely an example of his ability in the art of deception. If he claims that he can fly without wings and without the use of mechanical help of any kind, and in proof of his ability pulls another rabbit out of another hat, that is not proof of his ability to fly, but of his ability to lie, and he will without much hesitation be condemned as a faker. The demonstration of one thing has absolutely no bearing in proving the truth of the other, when there is no relationship between them.
The Ten Commandments, pp. 66-7

• Religion is all profit. They have no merchandise to buy, no commissions to pay, and no refunds to make for unsatisfactory service and results...Their commodity is fear. They blackmail their parishioners with threats of hell and damnation. These poor deluded people give them their hard earned money to save them from a hell that does not exist, and from eternal torment that was invented by the perverted minds of priests to rob the living and in addition, they are exempt from taxation! Insult to injury!

• Let me tell you that religion is the cruelest fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. It is the last of the great scheme of thievery that man must legally prohibit so as to protect himself from the charlatans who prey upon the ignorance and fears of the people.
The penalty for this type of extortion should be as severe as it is of other forms of dishonesty.
"Ingersoll the Magnificent" (Memorial Dedication Address, August 11, 1954)

• The news of Mr. Edison's death fell upon me like a pall. I felt as if a great void had been left in the world. What a pity that he could not have stayed the hand of death so that he could continue to unravel the secrets of Nature. What sort of "design" can there be in life when this grandest of all men is cut down unceremoniously by the Grim Reaper's scythe while idiots and imbeciles live on? This great genius is irreparably lost to the world.
"A Visit With Thomas Alva Edison"

• With this recognition of the finality of death, no one should willingly withhold acts that would bring benefits, joy or happiness to others.
from An Atheist Manifesto

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• It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

• The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than a deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.

• Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

• There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.

• Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.

• The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

• Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life.

• People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

• The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.

• The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

• You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

• To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

• The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbors as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant of others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

<TOP>

• God...a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.

• Religion is a primitive form of philosophy, [the] attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality.
The Objectivist Feb 1966 WMail Issue #5

• Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking...
Atlas Shrugged

• Do you believe in God, Andrei? No. Neither do I. But that's a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know. What do you mean? Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they'd never understand what I meant. It's a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do -- then, I know they don't believe in life. Why? Because, you see, God -- whatever anyone chooses to call God -- is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own.
We The Living Part One Chapter 9

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• I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for people.

• I don't fear the next world, or anything. I don't fear hell, and I don't look forward to heaven.

• If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

• If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.

• Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got to not forget to laugh.

<TOP>

• In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

• If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.

• A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically?
What Mad Pursuit

• A belief, at the time it was formulated, may not only have appealed to the imagination but also fit well with all that was then known. It can nevertheless be made to appear ridiculous because of facts uncovered later by science. What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at that time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs? Yet it is clear that some mysteries have still to be explained scientifically. While these remain unexplained, they can serve as an easy refuge for religious superstition. It seemed to me of the first importance to identify these unexplained areas of knowledge and to work toward their scientific understanding whether such explanations would turn out to confirm existing beliefs or to refute them.
What Mad Pursuit

<TOP>

• It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.

• (You don't believe in organized religion, yet a major theme in so many of your works seems to be a quest for God.)Yes, in a way--a quest for ultimate values, whatever they are. My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents...
Playboy interview with Ken Kelly, 1986

• You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
Childhood's End

• I would defend the liberty of concenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.

• A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

• The statement that God created man in his own image is ticking like a time bomb in the foundations of Christianity.

• I have encountered a few creationists and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created that whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading mankind?
June 5, 1998, in the essay Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Clarke's Third Law from Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible

<TOP>

---

• There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.

• No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

• You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here.

• God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consiousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.

• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

• You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

• I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

• I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

• If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

• It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

• It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

• Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

• I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves ... mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business ... trillions apart ... yet forming white surf in unison.
Ages on ages ... before any eyes could see ... year after year ... thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?...on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.
• Never at rest ... tortured by energy ... wasted prodigiously by the sun ... poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves ... and a new dance starts.
• Growing in size and complexity ... living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein ... dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle on to the dry land ... here it is standing ... atoms with consciousness ... matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea ... wonders at wondering ... I ... a universe of atoms ... an atom in the universe.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, as quoted by Inayat Bunglawala at this link.

• Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

• We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

• I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb.

• When things are going well, something will go wrong.
• When things just can't get any worse, they will.
Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.

• We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

<TOP>

• Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
My Own View in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) edited by Robert Holdstock; later published in Asimov on Science Fiction (1981)

• It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be ... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.
My Own View in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) edited by Robert Holdstock; later published in Asimov on Science Fiction (1981).

• I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
Free Inquiry (Spring 1982)

• If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
LIFE magazine (January 1984)

• Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centures since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
Canadian Atheists Newsletter (1994)

• Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

• There's something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul.
The Big and the Little, Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1944

• Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.

• Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

• I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.

• Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
On Religiosity, Free Inquiry

• When I die I won't go to heaven or hell, there will just be nothingness.
A World of Ideas

<TOP>

What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren't well connected.
Slaughterhouse 5

The name of the new religion, said Rumfoord, is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. . . The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
The Sirens of Titan

How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.
2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares about how we are or what we do. ... Religious skeptics often become very bitter towards the end, as did Mark Twain. ... I know why I will become bitter. I will finally realize that I have had it right all along: that I will not see God, that there is no heaven or Judgement Day.
2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt

The trouble with God isn't that He so seldom makes Himself known to us... He's holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically constantly... Contentedly adrift in the cosmos, were you?... That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while...
Bluebeard, pg. 173

How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? ... The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight lonliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.
address to a Unitarian congregation, Cambridge, Mass., January 27, 1980. quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, 'There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.' Hocus Pocus, pg. 182

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
Wampeters, Foma and Granfallons, When I Was Twenty-One

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying.

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot). Fates Worse than Death: An Auotbiographical Collage of the 1980's

Interviewer: Did the study of anthropology later color your writings?
Vonnegut: It confirmed my atheism, which was the faith of my fathers anyway. Religions were exhibited and studied as the Rube Goldberg inventions I'd always thought they were.

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I’m dead.

<TOP>

• How do I define God? I don't. Divinities have been understood in various ways in the cultural traditions that we know. Take, say, the core of the established religions today: the Bible. It is basically polytheistic, with the warrior God demanding of his chosen people that they not worship the other Gods and destroy those who do – in an extremely brutal way, in fact. It would be hard to find a more genocidal text in the literary canon, or a more violent and destructive character than the God who was to be worshipped. So that's one definition.
In the Prophets, one finds (sometimes) a different conception, much more humane. That's why the Prophets (the "dissident intellectuals" of their day) were persecuted, imprisoned, driven into the desert, etc. – other reasons included their geopolitical analysis, unwelcome to power. The intellectuals who were honored and privileged were those who centuries later were called "false prophets." More or less a cultural universal. There were different conceptions of divinity associated with these tendencies, and Greek and Zoroastrian influences are probable causes for later monotheistic tendencies (how one evaluates these are a different matter).
Looking beyond, we find other conceptions, of many kinds. But I have nothing to propose. People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don't. That's why you haven't found my "thoughts on this [for you] criticaI question." I have none, because I see no need for them (apart from the -- often extremely interesting and revealing – inquiry into human culture an history).
As for "First Principles," basing them on divinities is, I think, a very bad idea. That leaves anyone free to pick the "first principles" they choose on other grounds, and to disguise the choices as "what God commands." If its the warrior God of the Bible, the First Principles are horrendous (in the basic texts) and often uplifting – in Amos, for example; but recall that he made it clear that he was no intellectual (no "prophet," as the obscure Hebrew word is translated), but an ordinary farmer.
If you like Maslow's choices, fine, then say so. But nothing is gained by investing them with divinity, and a great deal is lost: specifically, the opportunity to question, elaborate, modify, or reject them. But these are basic elements of decent human life and thought, I believe.
If you want to use the word "God" to refer to "what you are and what you want" -- well, that's a terminological decision, not a substantive one. And a bad terminological decision, I think, for the reasons just mentioned.
Is "reality an accident"? Could the laws of nature have been other than what they are? Maybe one can make some sense of such questions, but bringing divinity into the story helps not at all. It only adds confusion and deflects serious thought and inquiry.
Is it "possible that the nature of reality could be a living urge towards freedom"? As Bakunin put it, is an "instinct for freedom" part of human nature, maybe part of organic nature? Could be. I hope so. But we don't know. But again, bringing divinity in just adds confusion and bars serious inquiry and action, in my opinion.
Others feel differently. They feel they need to ground their beliefs and hopes in something they call "God." OK. I don't legislate for others, but if they want my advice (no reason why they should), it's more or less as above.
On the linguistic work, it bears on these issues only tangentially, by seeking to explore some aspects of our essential and distinctive human nature. An exciting enterprise, I think, but these questions are barely touched.
From ZNet's ChomskyChat (www.lbbs.org), 1998 May 17, Reply to Darrenn Bills, on Definition of God.

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• I suggest that we might want to depose this incumbent God and start dealing with The Real World. He's proven — time and again — to be cruel, capricious, and vindictive. He drowns, crushes, burns, and starves millions of us every day. He created cancer, viruses, and germs to invade and destroy our bodies as He sees fit, and uses them very effectively. In His wisdom, He directed those in charge to impede stem cell research so that such a powerful approach would not be available to us and He wouldn't have to strain the Divine Intellect to disarm that defense. We amuse Him as we flail about vainly trying to appease Him. I vote that we dump Him.
Swift, 2 September 2005, "Off-Subject But Necessary"; in response to efforts to deflect Hurricane Katrina by prayer

•… it's time for the opening lecture in Test Design 101: Consider: a woman claims to be a musician. You seat her at a piano and demand that she prove her claim. She cannot play the piano, and you conclude that her claim has been invalidated. Hardly. You see, the lady is a cellist….You cannot challenge a claimant to do something they've never claimed they can do. That's why, at the JREF, we design a protocol only after the applicant has clearly stated (a) what they can do, (b) under what conditions, and (c) with what expected degree of success. And, the applicant must find the protocol appropriate, fair, agreeable, and adequate to prove their claim.
Swift, 21 October 2005, "Good Intentions"; about testing paranormal claims

• Uri Geller may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way.
An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural

• Sir, there is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.
Swift, 30 December 2005, "McGill University Featuring Pseudoscience"

• The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He sup plies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it's false data. Scientists aren't used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both.
Swift, 2 September 2005, "Another New Fan"

• I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition and that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s). Further, devils, demons, angels and saints are myths; there is no life after death, no heaven or hell; the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place–not to mention the 'ethnic cleansing' presently being performed by Christians in our world–and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women.
Skeptic magazine (1995 Vol.3 No.4 p.11)

<TOP>

• Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

• Such reports persist and proliferate because they sell. And they sell, I think, because there are so many of us who want so badly to be jolted out of our humdrum lives, to rekindle that sense of wonder we remember from childhood, and also, for a few of the stories, to be able, really and truly, to believe--in Someone older, smarter, and wiser who is looking out for us. Faith is clearly not enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal.

• For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

• One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge – even to ourselves – that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)
The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

• Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us – and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.
The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

• I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
The Burden Of Skepticism

•In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
1987 CSICOP keynote address

• The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

• You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact

• A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Contact, pg 244

• The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact p. 162

• What I'm saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact p. 164

• Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact p. 166

• The question [Do you believe in God?] has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I'm convinced God doesn't exist, or do I mean I'm not convinced he does exist? Those are two very different questions.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact p. 168

• You see, the religious people – most of them – really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition.
Sol Hadden in Carl Sagan's Contact p. 285

• The Earth is an object lesson for the apprentice gods. 'If you really screw up,' they get told, 'you'll make something like Earth.'
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact p. 286

• Part of my message is that we're not central to the purpose of the Cosmos. What happened to me makes us all seem very small.
Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact p. 420

• (When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago–when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, p. 325

• 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. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
1996 in his article In the Valley of the Shadow Parade Magazine Also, Billions and Billions p. 215

• The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble.
A&E Biography interview

• Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.

• In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?
Cosmos, page 257

• Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

• Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods.
Broca's Brain

• We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.

• One prominent American religion confidently predicted that the world would end in 1914. Well, 1914 has come and gone, and – whole the events of that year were certainly of some importance – the world did not, at least so far as I can see, seem to have ended. There are at least three responses that an organized religion can make in the face of such a failed and fundamental prophecy. They could have said, Oh, did we say '1914'? So sorry, we meant '2014'. A slight error in calculation. Hope you weren't inconvinenced in any way. But they did not. They could have said, Well, the world would have ended, except we prayed very hard and interceded with God so He spared the Earth. But they did not. Instead, the did something much more ingenious. They announced that the world had in fact ended in 1914, and if the rest of us hadn't noticed, that was our lookout. It is astonishing in the fact of such transparent evasions that this religion has any adherents at all. But religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. The fact that religions can be so shamelessly dishonest, so contemptuous of the intelligence of their adherents, and still flourish does not speak very well for the tough- mindedness of the believers. But it does indicate, if a demonstration was needed, that near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.
Broca's Brain

• It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand.

• There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.
Cosmos television series

• I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark

• If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults? The Demon Haunted World

• If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.
The Demon-Haunted World

• If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science.
The Demon-Haunted World

• Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural.... In Thailand, diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture. Witches are today being burned in South Africa.... The worldwide TM [Transcendental Meditation] organization has an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee, they promise to make you invisible, to enable you to fly.
The Demon-Haunted World

• In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.
The Demon-Haunted World

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• I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Without Feathers, 1976

• I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
Annie Hall

• To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
Stardust Memories, 1980

• I don't believe in afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
Getting Even

• Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
New Yorker, 'My Philosophy'

• I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

• How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?

• If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

<TOP>

What history shows is that science is very demanding and does not blindly accept any new idea that someone can come up with. New claims must be thoroughly supported by the data, especially when they may conflict with well-established knowledge. Any research scientist will tell you how very difficult it is to discover new knowledge, convince your colleagues that it is correct–as they enthusiastically play devil's advocate–and then get your results through the peer-review process to publication. When scientists express their objections to claims such as evidence for intelligent design in the universe, they are not being dogmatic. They are simply applying the same standard they would for any other extraordinary claim and demanding extraordinary evidence.
Besides, why would any scientist object to the notion of intelligent design or other supernatural phenomena, should the data warrant that they deserve attention? Most scientists would be delighted at the opening up of an exciting new field of study that would undoubtedly receive generous funding. As we will see, intelligent design, in its current form, simply incorporates neither the evidence nor the theoretical arguments to warrant such attention.
Furthermore, the assertions that science does not study the supernatural and that supernatural hypotheses are untestable are factually incorrect. Right under the noses of the leaders who make these public statements, capable, credentialed scientists are investigating the possibility of supernatural causes. As we will discuss in a later chapter, reputable institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, Harvard University, and Duke University are studying phenomena that, if verified, would provide strong empirical support for the existence of some nonmaterial element in the universe. These experiments are designed to test the healing power of distant, blinded intercessory prayer. Their results have been published in peer-reviwed medical journals.
God: The Failed Hypothesis

Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.
Physics and Psychics (1990) ch. 3

Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001) ch. 1

When people start using science to argue for their specific beliefs and delusions, to try to claim that they're supported by science, then scientists at least have to speak up and say, "You're welcome to your delusions, but don't say that they're supported by science."
"Interview with Particle Physicist Victor J Stenger," Positive Atheism (December 1998, January 1999, and February 1999)

A scenario is suggested by which the universe and its laws could have arisen naturally from "nothing." Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable.
preliminary summary for the forthcoming book, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? The Self-Contained Universe

Scientific evidence for God's existence is being claimed today by theists, many of whom carry respectable scientific or philosophical credentials. "He" who is neither a "she" nor an "it" supposedly answers prayers and otherwise dramatically affects the outcome of events. If these consequences are as significant as believers say, then the effects should be detectable in properly controlled experiments.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), ch. 3

Scientists have practical reasons for wishing that religion and science be kept separate. They can see nothing but trouble ... if they venture into the deeply divisive issue of religion – especially when their results tend to support a highly unpopular, atheistic conclusion.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), ch. 3

People are entitled to their opinions, but when the opinion is in disagreement with the data – with the facts – when that opinion does not stand up under critical or rational scrutiny, I think we have a right to point that out. We shouldn't be stepping on anybody's toes when we do that. If they're going to be spouting off nonsense, then we should say that – not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of scientific fact. When someone says science says something, and science doesn't say something ("It doesn't say that! That's a misrepresentation of what science says."), then I think we can state that. And if it ruffles some feathers, so what? I just don't see the basis for arguing that creationism has equal standing with evolution.
"Interview with Particle Physicist Victor J Stenger," Positive Atheism (December 1998, January 1999, and February 1999)

From this experience, I have learned what science asks of us when we claim the existence of an extraordinary new phenomenon. It requires much, including years of hard work, uncompromising honesty, and willingness to accept failure. I can quickly recognize fallacious logic or faulty experimental procedure when I read a paper that purports to observe something that goes beyond existing knowledge. I am dubious and suspicious whenever an important result has been obtained too easily or too quickly, and reported in the media before it has run the gamut of critical review by disinterested, knowledgeable parties.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001)

If it looks like God does not exist, quacks like God does not exist, then there is a good chance he does not....
Proof is not required to believe. But some sign, some evidence is needed. None exists....
Find some inkling of evidence. There is none.
on his list, AVOID_L, November 5, 2001

"Where did all the matter come from?"
E = mc^2 says matter and energy are the same entity. Since E = 0, the total matter of the universe is zero. Zero does not have to come from anything.
Now, if by "matter" you just mean the equivalent of rest energy, then that came from gravitational energy during the expansion in the early universe.
response to having been asked for a simple explanation to the question, "Where did all the matter come from?" in a letter to Cliff Walker (September 13, 2001)

We are only devoted to science as the best means humans have developed, so far, for arriving at an approximation to the truth about objective reality – whatever that truth may be. We are not closed minded against psi, religion, alternative medicine, or any paranormal claims nor prejudiced against any individual adherent. Show us the evidence and we will consider it, but only steadfastly insisting on the same rules that we would apply to evidence for a new particle or a new drug. In particular, we refuse to agree to adopting new criteria ... just for the benefit of researchers in a field of study that cannot seem to get significant results any other way.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001) chapter 10

I am not one of those who think that science has nothing to say about ultimate origins. I will try to show that it has a lot to say, although what it does say is not always directly subject to the empirical testing that characterizes conventional scientific statements. Nevertheless, we have theories of physics and cosmology that are already well-established by their success in meeting the challenge of severe empirical testing against existing data. We have every right to logically extrapolate those theories into the gaps where empirical data are currently not available, and may indeed never be. Those extrapolations can turn out to be misdirected, so they should not be treated as scientifically established facts. At the very least, however, they can serve to develop possible scenarios by which the gaps in current knowledge might plausibly be filled by natural explanations, thus refuting any assertions that a supernatural explanation is required by the data.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001) ch. 4

I do not think science has to make any apologies. It looks at the world and tells it like it is. And we all live longer, better lives because of this dispassionate view. Sure, it commands awe and provides inspiration. Still, I would rather be operated on by a surgeon who sees me as an assemblage of atoms than one who lovingly tries to manipulate what he or she imagines are my vital energy fields.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001) ch. 6

While science continually uncovers new mysteries, it has removed much of what was once regarded as deeply mysterious. Although we certainly do not know the exact nature of every component of the universe, the basic principles of physics seem to apply out to the farthest horizon visible to us today.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001) ch. 6

Altnerative explanations are always welcome in science, if they are better and explain more. Alternative explanations that explain nothing are not welcome....
Note how science changed those beliefs when new data became available. Relgions stick to the same ancient beliefs regardless of the data.
responding to someone on his list, AVOID_L, November 5, 2001

The battle over the validity of evolution has been publicly posed as a scientific one. However, you will find little sign of it in scientific journals, where such quarrels as exist are over details, not the basic concept.... Evolution has proved so useful as a paradigm for the origin and structure of life that it constitutes the foundation of the sciences of biology and medicine.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001)

In the United States, the new creationist movement has convinced many people and their political servants that scientists are being unfair in not supporting the teaching of alternatives to evolution in science classes. They say it is censorship to exclude intelligent design from those classes. The usual argument raised against teaching intelligent design is that it unconstitutionally promotes religion. Design promoters, however, insist that they have no particular designer in mind. No one believes them, but skilled lawyers arguing for the cause of impartiality on their behalf could probably prevail in court. In any case, a better argument exists: Intelligent design theory, as currently formulated by its leading proponents, should not be taught in science classes because it is provably wrong.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), ch. 4

People have a hard time imagining how the universe can possibly have come about by anything other than a miracle, a violation of natural law. The intuition being expressed here is at least twofold: First, it is widely believed that something cannot come from nothing, where that "something" refers to the substance of the universe -- its matter and energy -- and "nothing" can be interpreted in this context as a state of zero energy and mass. Second, it is also widely believed that the way in which the substance of the universe seems to be structured in an orderly fashion, rather than simply being randomly distributed, could not have happened except by design.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), ch. 6

To most theistic believers, human life can have no meaning in a universe without God. Quite sincerely, and with understandable yearning for a meaning to their existence, they reject the possibility of no God. In their minds, only a purposeful universe based on God is possible and science can do nothing else but support this "truth."
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001)

The argument from design rests on the notion that everything, but God, must come from something. However, once you agree that it is logically possible for an entity to exist that was not itself created, namely God, then that entity can just as well be the universe itself. Indeed, this is a more economical possibility, not requiring the additional hypothesis of a supernatural power outside the universe....
... To [creationists], it is not a matter of logic anyway, but common sense. They see no way that the universe could have just happened, without intent. "How can something come from nothing?" they continue to ask, never wondering how God came from nothing.
Has Science Found God? (2001), ch. 3

The argument from design stands or falls on whether it can be demonstrated that some aspect of the universe such as its origin or biological life could not have come about naturally. The burden of proof is ... on the supernaturalist to demonstrate that something from outside nature must be introduced to explain the data.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), ch. 4

In short, evolution is as close to being a scientific fact as is possible for any theory, given that science is open-ended and no one can predict with certainty what may change in the future. The prospect that evolution by natural selection, at least as a broad mechanism, will be overthrown in the future is about as likely as the prospect of finding out some day that the Earth is really flat. Unfortunately, those who regard these scientific facts as a threat to faith have chosen to distort and misrepresent them to the public.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), ch. 2

It was not that I thought I was smarter. I had simply explored science and found what seemed to me a far more powerful authority. And, I did not steal or murder because I thought they were wrong, not because I feared damnation.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), Preface

Define self-awareness and tell me what it is about it that requires something more than a material explanation. I do not accept the burden of explaining all phenomena, real or imagined. If you think more than matter is required for this thing you call self-awareness, which you have not defined, then you have the burden of showing why.
responding to the question, "What is your preferred parsimonious explanation for the fact of self-awareness? Most of the hypotheses offered to explain consciousness seem to me to fail the parsimony test. None seems satisfactory. How oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, sodium, chlorine, fluorine, magnesium, iron, manganese, silicon, iodine, and a few other trace elements ever interact to become self-aware seems to me the most important question in all of the debates about the nature of creation." on his list, AVOID_L, October 18, 2001

Any strategy that attempts to reinforce faith by undermining science is also doomed to failure. Showing that some scientific theory is wrong will not prove that the religious alternative is correct by default. When the sun was shown not to be the center of the universe, as Copernicus had proposed, the Earth was not moved back to that singular position in the cosmos. If Darwinian evolution is proved wrong, biologists will not develop a new theory based on the hypothesis that each species was created separately by God 6,000 years ago.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), Preface

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.
Physics and Psychics (1990) p. 83. Thales (625?-546? BCE) was a Greek philosopher who was the first to posit a godless universe that runs entirely on natural laws.

But, as we have seen, movement does not require a mover, and modern quantum mechanics has shown that not all effects require a cause. And even if they did, why would the Prime Mover need to be a supernatural anthropomorphic deity such as the Judaeo-Christian God? Why could it not just as well be the material universe itself?
discussing Aquinas's adaptation of Aristotle's ideas as "proof" of the existence of God, Physics and Psychics (1990) p. 88

Most people in Bayonne, like folks in similar towns across the country, had little education and could neither verbalize nor intellectualize their problems very well. They just suffered them. They listened eagerly when the priests promised them everlasting life in paradise, where they would be reunited with their departed love ones, but this was not enough when the suffering and guilt were unbearable.
The parish priests did their best and I fault them little. They operated within a framework developed over centuries that would not have survived this long if it did not give people something they wanted, no matter how insufficient....
My father ... remained a Catholic and always expressed belief in God. He did not argue with me about my views – although he and other older relatives often told me to keep my mouth shut.... While they succeeded in keeping me from expressing my thoughts too openly, they had no effect on those thoughts. As long as I kept my mouth shut, they left me alone.
on life growing up in New Jersey, in Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), ch. 1

And, yet again, because I can predict the line of criticism that this book will generate, I need to make it clear up-front that I am not claiming that the absence of evidence eliminates all possibilities for a god to exist in every conceivable form. And, I am not evaluating all the theological and philosophical arguments for or against God. I am simply evaluating the scientific arguments and claimed scientific evidence for a deity according to the same criteria that science applies to any extraordinary claim. I conclude that, so far, they fail to meet the test.
Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001)

Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.
on his list, AVOID_L, November 5, 2001

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• Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer ... its anti-intellectualism ... its puerile hymns ... and its faith-healing ... are made to order for King Kid America.
Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, Good King Herod (1989)

• American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.

• Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

• Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

• During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.

• Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.

• Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time.

• People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

• Self-help books are making life downright unsafe. Women desperate to catch a man practice all the ploys recommended by these authors. Bump into him, trip over him, knock him down, spill something on him, scald him, but meet him.

• Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

• The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

• Those colorful denizens of male despair, the Bowery bum and the rail-riding hobo, have been replaced by the bag lady and the welfare mother. Women have even taken over Skid Row.

• True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

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• I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.
A Place For My Stuff

• We created god in our own image and likeness!

• I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said, 'This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me.'
New York Times, 20 August 1995, pg. 17.
(He attended Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, but left during his sophomore year in 1952 and never went back to school. Before that he attended a Catholic grammar school, Corpus Christi, which he called an experimental school.).

• If churches want to play the game of politics, let them pay admission like everyone else
What Am I Doing In New Jersey?

• This is a lttle prayer dedicated to the separation of church and state. I guess if they are going to force those kids to pray in schools they might as well have a nice prayer like this: Our Father who art in heaven, and to the republic for which it stands, thy kingdom come, one nation indivisible as in heaven, give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail. Crown thy good into temptation but deliver us from the twilight's last gleaming. Amen and Awomen.
Saturday Night Live

• I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

• Religion convinced the world that there's an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there's 10 things he doesn't want you to do or else you'll to to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! ...And he needs money! He's all powerful, but he can't handle money!
You Are All Diseased

• The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music.
Brain Droppings

• I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to God are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.
You Are All Diseased

•A man came up to me on the street and said I used to be messed up out of my mind on drugs but now I'm messed up out of my mind on Jeeesus Chriiist.

• I have as much authority as the pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.
Brain Droppings

• Jesus was a cross dresser
Brain Droppings

• I finally accepted Jesus. not as my personal savior, but as a man I intend to borrow money from.
Brain Droppings

• Instead of school busing and prayer in schools, which are both controversial, why not a joint solution? Prayer in buses. Just drive these kids around all day and let them pray their fuckn' empty little heads off.
Brain Droppings

• When it comes to BULLSHIT...BIG-TIME, MAJOR LEAGUE BULLSHIT... you have to stand IN AWE, IN AWE of the all time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion.
You Are All Diseased

• Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it, religion has actually convinced people that there's an INVISIBLE MAN...LIVING IN THE SKY...who watches every thing you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten special things that he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever 'til the end of time...but he loves you.
You Are All Diseased

• I want you to know, when it comes to believing in god- I really tried. I really really tried. I tried to believe that there is a god who created each one of us in his own image and likeness, loves us very much and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize...something is FUCKED-UP. Something is WRONG here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is NOT good work. If this is the best god can do, I am NOT impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently run universe, this guy would have been out on his all-powerful-ass a long time ago.
You Are All Diseased

• Trillions and trillions of prayers every day asking and begging and pleading for favors. 'Do this' 'Gimme that' 'I want a new car' 'I want a better job'. And most of this praying takes place on Sunday. And I say fine, pray for anything you want. Pray for anything. But...what about the divine plan? Remember that? The divine plan. Long time ago god made a divine plan. Gave it a lot of thought. Decided it was a good plan. Put it into practice. And for billion and billions of years the divine plan has been doing just fine. Now you come along and pray for something. Well, suppose the thing you want isn't in god's divine plan. What do you want him to do? Change his plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a divine plan. What's the use of being god if every run-down schmuck with a two dollar prayer book can come along and fuck up your plan? And here's something else, another problem you might have; suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? 'Well it's god's will. God's will be done.' Fine, but if it gods will and he's going to do whatever he wants to anyway; why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me. Couldn't you just skip the praying part and get right to his will?
You Are All Diseased

• You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Joe Pesci. Two reasons; first of all, I think he's a good actor. Ok. To me, that counts. Second; he looks like a guy who can get things done. Joe Pesci doesn't fuck around. Doesn't fuck around. In fact, Joe Pesci came through on a couple of things that god was having trouble with. For years I asked god to do something about my noisy neighbor with the barking dog. Joe Pesci straightened that cock-sucker out with one visit.
You Are All Diseased

• I noticed that of all the prayers I used to offer to god, and all the prayers that I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answer at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want. Half the time I don't. Same as god 50/50. Same as the four leaf clover, the horse shoe, the rabbit's foot, and the wishing well. Same as the mojo man. Same as the voodoo lady who tells your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles. It's all the same; 50/50. So just pick your superstitions, sit back, make a wish and enjoy yourself. And for those of you that look to the Bible for it's literary qualities and moral lessons; I got a couple other stories I might like to recommend for you. You might enjoy The Three Little Pigs. That's a good one. It has a nice happy ending. Then there's Little Red Riding Hood. Although it does have that one x-rated part where the Big-Bad-Wolf actually eats the grandmother. Which I didn't care for, by the way. And finally, I've always drawn a great deal of moral comfort from Humpty Dumpty. The part I liked best: ...and all the king's horses, and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again. That's because there is no Humpty Dumpty, and there is no god. None. Not one. Never was. No god.
You Are All Diseased

• Religion is sort of like a lift in your shoes. If it makes you feel better, fine. Just don't ask me to wear your shoes.

• Here's another question I've been pondering- What is all this shit about Angels? Have you herd this? 3 out of 4 people belive in Angels. Are you FUCKING STUPID? Has everybody lost their mind? You know what I think it is? I think it's a massive, collective, psychotic chemical flashback for all the drugs smoked, swallowed, shot, and obsorbed rectally by all Americans from 1960 to 1990. 30 years of street drugs will get you some fucking Angels my friend!
You Are All Diseased

• What about Goblins, huh? Doesn't anybody belive in Goblins? You never hear about this.. Except on Halloween and then it's all negative shit. And what about Zombies? You never hear from Zombies! That's the trouble with Zombies, they're unreliable! I say if you're going to go for the Angel bullshit you might as well go for the Zombie package as well..
You Are All Diseased

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• The official religions and patriotic fervor of many states make their troops willing to fight suicidally. The latter willingness is one so strongly programmed into us citizens of modern states, by our schools and churches and governments, that we forget what a radical break it makes with previous human history. .... Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years.

• AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.

• All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

• Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

• I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

• Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

• Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

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• Children are naïve -- they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.

• There is no hell. There is only France.

• The other factor that people forget about the southern region is the amount of inter-marriage that has already occurred there, and so there are certain genetic defects come to the fore when you have a large inter-marriage population. That means regression .... And in fact Utah is another state, which is basically owned by the Mormon church, which also has a lot of inter-marriage and because this type of inter-marriage there is a large proportion of blind people in Utah. That's why when you go across the street, instead of just a stop light that you can see, they have stop lights that make a coo-coo noise to tell you when to cross the street- that's true!

• Tax the FUCK out of the churches!

• Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.

• My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

• So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity.

• If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

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• Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

• Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

• Everything is clearer when you're in love.

• A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

• You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

• I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.

• If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

• You're in a fishbowl so make use of it, man.

• When you're drowning, you don't say 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,' you just scream.

• I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

• God is a concept,
By which we can measure,
Our pain,
I'll say it again,
God is a concept,
By which we can measure,
Our pain,
I don't believe in magic,
I don't believe in I-ching,
I don't believe in bible,
I don't believe in tarot,
I don't believe in Hitler,
I don't believe in Jesus,
I don't believe in Kennedy,
I don't believe in Buddha,
I don't believe in mantra,
I don't believe in Gita,
I don't believe in yoga,
I don't believe in kings,
I don't believe in Elvis,
I don't believe in Zimmerman,
I don't believe in Beatles,
I just believe in me...

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• The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realize that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.
Said in an interview with Sheena McDonald

• You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life - all living things- is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.
Going the Whole Hog

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Click here for a page of quotes from The God Delusion

• 'Halloween' put me on the map, and I'm very sad to hear of his death.

• We have all been beaten up in our careers, because horror is viewed as a low-rent genre, just a notch or two above pornography. And while it's true that we traffic in dark areas of violence and horror in our profession, because we get everything out on the screen and don't carry it around with us, we really are mostly nice guys.

• I've got so much stuff in boxes at home, I could have five different museums.

• In England, I'm a horror movie director. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In the US, I'm a bum.

• What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.

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• Magic is the art of creating false (but funny or beautiful) cause-and-effect relationships. That's our area of expertise. When we do it on a stage, the audience is fooled, but only for the moment, only in the theater. They know they're watching a show. They know it's all tricks. They do not go home and try to float in the air or catch bullets in their teeth. [But] When we see scam artists peddling false cause-and-effect as reality; when we see the tools of theater and poetry used to victimize the vulnerable; when we sick people submitting to "medical procedures" that belong in a Three Stooges movie; all this enrages us.

• If there existed even one psychic who had predicted that disaster, we'd be very, very interested. But, nope. What haunts me about 9/11 is the horrible knowledge that those who did the deed did it to further the divine will. Whenever we hear a politician bless killing, we should think twice.

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• How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost?
Losing Faith in Faith

• You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say God is love, they will claim that you are taking things out of context!
Losing Faith in Faith

• I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that iscontingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.
Losing Faith in Faith

• I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil--you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself.
Losing Faith in Faith

• There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling–absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.
Losing Faith in Faith

• It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.
Losing Faith in Faith

• For my money, I'll bet on reason and humanistic kindness. Even if I am wrong I will have enjoyed my life, the existence of which is under little dispute.
Losing Faith in Faith

• The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions.
Losing Faith in Faith

• Not thinking critically, I assumed that the successful prayers were proof that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was something wrong with me.
Losing Faith in Faith

• To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance.
Losing Faith in Faith

• Without The Law of Moses would we all be wandering around like little gods, stealing, raping, and spilling blood whenever our vanity was offended?
Losing Faith in Faith

• Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen! If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.

• Just say NO to religion.

• You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, But I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime.

• You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
Losing Faith in Faith

• Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
Losing Faith in Faith

• I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.
Losing Faith in Faith

• If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray? Losing Faith in Faith

• We were blood brothers, pals forever. He was my very best friend. Nobody else could see him. I now know he was just pretend.
Losing Faith in Faith

• Freethought is respectable. Freethought is crucial. Freethought needs to be publicized.
Losing Faith in Faith

• Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.
Losing Faith in Faith

• If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?
Losing Faith in Faith

• To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de-selected, unfavored by God, and that I am special, above it all.
Losing Faith in Faith

• Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.
Losing Faith in Faith

• I have an Easter challenge for Christians. My challenge is simply this: tell me what happened on Easter. I am not asking for proof. My straightforward request is merely that Christians tell me exactly what happened on the day that their most important doctrine was born.
Losing Faith in Faith

• Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines?
Losing Faith in Faith

• The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible.
Losing Faith in Faith

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• Religion has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred, or holy, or whatever. What it means is, here's an idea or a notion that you are not allowed to say anything bad about, you're just not . Why not? Because you're not. If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with you're free to argue about it as much as you like. Everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you're free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday, you say - I respect that. Why should it be that it is perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative Party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics verses that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion on about how the universe began, about who created the universe, no that's holy! We're used to not challenging religious ideas and it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard (Dawkins) creates when he does it. Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we've agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.
(Submitted by John Ditchburn)

• This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in--an interesting hole I find myself in--fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
(Submitted by John Ditchburn)

• Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [as the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED"
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (book one of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series), p. 50

• A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?"
In a parable spoofing modern creationism that Adams often told, as retold by Richard Dawkins in "Lament for Douglas" (14 May 2001)

• Even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (book one of the Dirk Gently series), p. 216

• In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move.
The Hitch Hiker'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?
From Last Chance To See

• Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
From Last Chance To See

• He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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• WN: You came to astronomy through your interest in religion. Do you see a way to get science and religion to play nice with each other?
Porco: That's a big question. I know that I derive the same kind of spiritual fulfillment from what I do, being a planetary scientist, seeing our exploration of the solar system come to fruition. I get such a spiritual high from it that I don't even see the need for religion. People gravitate to religion to feel a connection to the underlying meaning of everything. Well, as a scientist you're always looking for the underlying meaning, and that to me is such a spiritual life, I wish people would open themselves up to that wonder.
Meet Carolyn Porco, the Scientist Who Made Saturn a Rock Star

• We know exactly what it's like to be dead. Because it is exactly like the state we inhabited before we were born.

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• Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.

• In my opinion, the question of God's existence is a scientifically insoluble one.

• Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

• Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

• Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

• The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

• The ultimate fallacy is theological: if God is omniscient and omnipotent, he should not need to be reminded or inveigled into healing someone.

• We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

• The fact is, there is no evidence that that secondhand smoke causes cancer or that cell-phone use generates brain tumors; likewise, the Gulf War Syndrome appears to be a chimera, television does not cause violence, Satanic cults are phantasmagorical, most recovered memories of childhood abuse are nothing more than false memories planted by bad therapists, silicon breast implants cause nothing more than metastatic litigation, the drug war was lost decades ago, and the drug emperor has no clothes–he's butt naked and it's high time someone said it. We would be well advised to remember the law of large numbers, and to keep in mind that we have selective memory of the most egregious events and that most of our fears are illusory–the vaporous product of a culture of fear of which we are both creators and victims.
from The Science of Good and Evil

• Provisional ethics may not be ultimately satisfying for the moral absolutist, but since there is no justification outside of an omnipotent and omniscent God for such moral absolutism–and there is no convincing scientific evidence that such a God exists–then provisional ethics and provisional justice are the best we can do. If you want more–if you need some source of moral verification and objectification outside of yourself, your society, and you species–then you are living in the grip of a supernatural illusion. I'm sorry, but you can't get more without eschewing reality. Given the nature of our universe, our world, and our selves, this is the best we can do. Fortunately, it is enough. It leads to a moral humanity because a moral nature is part of human nature. It exists independent and outside of any individual because it belongs to the species. As long as humanity continues so too will morality, provisional though it may be.
from The Science of Good and Evil

• I believe that morality is the natural outcome of evolutionary and historical forces operating on both individuals and groups. The moral feelings of doing the right thing (such as virtuousness) or doing the wrong thing (such as guilt) were generated by nature as part of human evolution. Although cultures differ on what they define as right and wrong, the moral feelings of doing the right or wrong thing are universal to all humans. Human universals are pervasice and powerful and include at their core the fact that we are, by nature, moral and immoral, good and evil, altruistic and selfish, cooperative and competitive, peaceful and bellicose, virtuous and nonvirtuous. Individuals and groups vary on the expression of such universal traits, but everyone has them. Most people most of the time in most circumstances are good and do the right thing for themselves and for others. But some people some of the time and in some circumstances are bad and do the wrong thing for themselves and for others. As a consequence, moral principles are provisionally true, where they apply to most people, in most cultures, in most circumstances, most of the time...
I believe that although we live in a determined universe and are governed by the laws of nature and forces of culture and history, because we can never know in its entirety the near-infinite casual net that determines our actions, we are free moral agents. And although there is no absolute and ultimate divinity to dole out rewards and punishments in some unspecified future, since moral principles are provisionally true for most people most of the time in most circumstances, provisional justice can be derived from individual responsibility and culpability through social and cultural beliefs, customs, mores, and laws that produce feelings of virtuosness and guilt and administer rewards and punishments...
from The Science of Good and Evil

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• Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. If you're looking for violent rape imagery, the Bible's right there in your hotel room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it is, and you're justified because God told you to.

• I believe that there is no God… Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more… Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around… I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do”… Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

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• Although I'm an atheist, I don't fear death more than, say, sharing a room in a detox center with a sobbing Rush Limbaugh.

• Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world.

• Question: You write that our atoms are traceable to the big bang, which makes us a part of the universe itself. Why is this concept important for people to understand?
Answer: If people knew these facts--really knew them--would they still wage war on one another? Would they still act selfishly in their personal affairs? Would they harbor hatred for their neighbors? I do not know. Perhaps so. But you can bet they'll think twice about it. By looking up into the vast darkness of space, you are forced by your conscience to take pause and reflect on your own place in the cosmos.
THE FUTURIST, November-December 2004

• People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs.
This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.
Letter to the Editor, "A Teacher, a Student and a Church-State Dispute", The New York Times, December 21, 2006

• What happened before the beginning?
Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. Yet certain type of religious person tends to assert, with a tinge of smugness, that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime-mover. In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God.
But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify--a multiverse, for instance? Or what if the universe, like its particles, just popped into existence from nothing?
Such replies usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist on the ever-shifting frontier. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy. “The universe always was” goes unrecognized as a legitimate answer to “What was around before the beginning?” But for many religious people, the answer “God always was” is the obvious and pleasing answer to “What was around before God?”
No matter who you are, engaging in the quest to discover where and how things began tends to induce emotional fervor--as if knowing the beginning bestows upon you some form of fellowship with, or perhaps governance over, all that comes later. So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going.
In the Beginning

• At nearly every public lecture that I give on the universe, I try to reserve adequate time at the end for questions. The succession of subjects is predictable. First, the questions relate directly to the lecture. They next migrate to sexy astrophysical subjects such as black holes, quasars, and the Big Bang. If I have enough time left over to answer all questions, and if the talk is in America, the subject eventually reaches God. Typical questions include "Do scientists believe in God?" "Do you believe in God?" and "Do your studies in astrophysics make you more or less religious?"
Publishers have come to learn that there is a lot of money in God, especially when the author is a scientist and when the book title includes a direct juxtaposition of scientific and religious themes...Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion...The argument is simple. I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document. Indeed, I can make an even stronger statement. Whenever people have used religious documents to make detailed predictions about the physical world they have been famously wrong.
Holy Wars An Astrophysicist Ponders the God Question

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• So, I'll out myself. I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection.
Confessions of a Lonely Atheist, in New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001

• When I sent out a casual and nonscientific poll of my own to a wide cast of acquaintances, friends and colleagues, I was surprised, but not really, to learn that maybe 60 percent claimed a belief in a God of some sort, including people I would have bet were unregenerate skeptics. Others just shrugged. They don't think about this stuff. It doesn't matter to them. They can't know, they won't beat themselves up trying to know and for that matter they don't care if their kids believe or not.
Confessions of a Lonely Atheist, in New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001

• Still, the current climate of religiosity can be stifling to nonbelievers, and it helps now and then to cry foul. For one thing, some of the numbers surrounding the deep religiousness of America, and the rarity of nonbelief, should be held to the fire of skepticism, as should sweeping statistics of any sort. Yes, Americans are comparatively more religious than Europeans, but while the vast majority of them may say generically that they believe in God, when asked what their religion is, a sizable fraction, 11 percent, report "no religion," a figure that has more than doubled since the early 1970's and that amounts to about 26 million people.
As [The Nation columnist Katha] Pollitt points out, when one starts looking beneath the surface of things and adding together the out-front atheists with the indifferent nonbelievers, you end up with a much larger group of people than Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Unitarians put together.
Confessions of a Lonely Atheist, in New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001

• Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticized or mocked.
Confessions of a Lonely Atheist, in New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2001

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• Why won't God heal amputees?

• The four billion people who are not Christians look at the Christian story in exactly the same way that you look at the Santa story, the Mormon story and the Muslim story. In other words, there are four billion people who stand outside of the Christian bubble, and they can see reality clearly. The fact is, the Christian story is completely imaginary.

• It is time for all human beings to join together and face reality. We must break free of the irrationality and understand that every human “god” is imaginary. This includes God, Allah, Vishnu and all the rest. We must understand that the author is incorrect when he states that, “The atheist alternative is a world in which right and wrong are ultimately matters of opinion, and in which we are finally accountable to no one but ourselves.” He is incorrect because this is not “the atheist alternative.” This is, in fact, the reality of our world. This is how our world has always been, and how it always will be. And let us be thankful for that. For if we followed all of the commandments of the “god” in the Bible, we would have to kill half of the people living in America today.

• How many gods do you believe in?
Ask that question in America, and the answer is usually “one”…but not always. Depending on which poll you read, anywhere from 2% to 10% of Americans are atheists.
I am an atheist. But what is an atheist?
There is no simple answer to that question. Even atheists don’t agree. I can only speak for myself. I do not believe in any supernatural being, including the god of the bible. I don’t believe in any god or goddess that has ever been worshipped by a human being.
It’s safe to say that you don’t believe in Zeus or Ra either and yet you probably can’t understand why I don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian god.
For me the answer is this: the bible doesn’t make sense. The bible is a book written approximately two thousand years ago by uneducated, superstitious men who knew nothing about physics or science. They didn’t understand how the world works, so they made up stories to help them feel less afraid.
Sure, some of the Ten Commandments are good rules to follow: don’t lie, don’t steal, and don’t kill people. These are good rules of thumb, like the Golden Rule. But I don’t believe the commandments were dictated by a god.
The fact that the God of the bible is okay with people owning slaves is proof that the bible wasn’t written by a god: it was written by men who owned slaves. If god truly wrote (or at least inspired men to write) the bible, don’t you think he would have proclaimed in a deep god-like voice, “Slavery is wrong and I will not tolerate it any longer.”? It seems logical that a loving god wouldn’t want any of his people to be enslaved by others.
I realize I am not going to change anyone’s beliefs with just one example, but I invite you to do some research of your own. That’s how I came to believe the things I believe and don’t believe; by reading and thinking for myself.
Atheists are not evil, devil-worshipping pedophile criminals. For the most part, atheists are hard-working, patriotic, law-abiding citizens. We pay our taxes, love our families, and worry about the price of gas. We respect the rights of others and we try to love our neighbors.
I hope you will do the same.

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• Evolution and religion may not be at war, but no agreement seems possible in their most basic tenets. Traditional religions are based on dualism, and evolution is strictly materialist. Dualism is founded on a belief in the supernatural. The materialist position forms the basis for belief in naturalism, which holds that "the empirical procedure of exploration and verification is the only known reliable method of discovering truth" (Smith, 1952). For the materialist, the supernatural has no basis in reality but instead is an unwarranted distraction brought about through mythology.

• The proposition that one must "believe in evolution" as people blindly believe in God is easily discounted. Still, much of modern evolutionary biology today is sprinkled with tinges of dualism. Notions of progress, purpose, emergent properties, optimality, and increasing complexity in evolution all contain vague hints of dualism, and are debated in symposia and published in books and journals by today's most active evolutionists. These architects of modern naturalism have traditionally shunned the ideas of religions, but to what degree they discount the supernatural remains to be seen.

• We still live in a world, however, that is predominantly theist, particularly in America where 95% of the citizens believe in God (according to the Gallup Poll of 2001). In this environment, many evolutionary biologists are reluctant to carry the implications of Darwinism to their logical extent. Theists vote, pay the taxes, and support the research institutions where most naturalists work. Theists do not appreciate hearing the vulgar truth of evolutionary theory, that mankind is no fallen angel, has no immortal soul, nor free will, and was not specially created. So what is a naturalist evolutionary biologist to do in this climate?

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• Nah, there's no bigger atheist than me. Well, I take that back. I'm a cancer screening away from going agnostic and a biopsy away from full-fledged Christian.
Details magazine, October 1997, p. 78

• The God's honest truth is that I'm probably funnier, but he's smarter. Here's the thing about Stern – he's really a smart guy. He's nutty. He's outrageous. He's all those things, but he's also a very smart guy.

• The country is run by extremists because the moderates have shit to do.

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• Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse.

• Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago.

• The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory.

• Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

• Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance.

• The history of Christianity is principally a story of mankind's misery and ignorance rather than of its requited love of God.

• Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.

• There are ideas within Buddhism that are so incredible as to render the dogma of the virgin birth plausible by comparison.

• It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

• There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.

• A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a working scientist come Monday morning, without ever having to account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept.

• The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.

• Given the astounding number of galaxies and potential worlds arrayed
overhead, the complexities of life on earth and the advances in our
ethical discourse over the last 2,000 years, the world's religions
offer a view of reality that is now so utterly impoverished as to
scarcely constitute a view of reality at all.
Submitted by Robert Umbehant

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• I came to the conclusion [that] I do not believe in the existence of a god or in the hereafter.

• Avoiding offense means that we don't accept each other as equals.

• Every time I went on TV I got a threat.

• I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant 'while under their noses women are living like slaves.

• I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.

• I turned around and saw this sweet, young Dutch guy, about 24 years old. With freckles! And he was like, 'Madam, I hope the mujahedeen get you and kill you.'

• Colonisation and slavery have created a sentiment of culpability in the West that leads people to adulate foreign traditions. This is a lazy, even racist attitude.

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• [interviewer]: You know, a lot of filmmakers seem to be either very literary-based or else very movie-based who just watch movies. You seem to really be developing this new visual style that suits each story. You know, how did you find this third road?
DA: It's probably because I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.

• Just got back from the Q2 wrap party in vegas that Activision threw for us. Having a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief in luck, fate, karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me is blackjack. Playing blackjack properly is a test of personal discipline. It takes a small amount of skill to know the right plays and count the cards, but the hard part is making yourself consistantly behave like a robot, rather than succumbing to your gut instincts.

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• At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, "But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven." If so, I was going to reply, "You know what? You're right. Fine."

• Interviewer: "For a miracle man, you're not very religious."
Armstrong: "I don't have anything against organized religion per se. We all need something in our lives. I personally just have not accepted that belief. But I'm one of the few."

• Armstrong is deeply suspicious of organised religion ... Armstrong believes it is possible to be a good person while not believing. "I think we all have obligations to be good, honest, hard-working, caring and compassionate," he says. "You have to try and it won't always be easy but you try your best. I do not believe that because you are not prepared to submit yourself to a god or a higher being, that when you get to the end of the road, you will be sent down. I'm not prepared to believe that."

• If there was a god, I'd still have both nuts.

• The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care.
I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsiblity to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whther I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, "But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven." If so, I was going to reply, "You know what? You're right. Fine."
I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research.
Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.
To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be.
Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.
So, I believed.
It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life pp. 116-118

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• I've always been an atheist. Science explains everything. There is no meaning in life except to be the best at something. If only I could be the best at something, perhaps my parents would love me.

• Religion is silly. When you're dead, you turn into a source for future flowers and plants.... I don't know what's on the other side of death and it scares me. Darkness and nothingness scare me. I'd rather face the miseries of my day-to-day life than turn into darkness.

• Allow me to confirm that yes, I am a diehard atheist, and have been since I was about 5 and discovered to my annoyance that there was no santa claus, no easter bunny, and no tooth fairy. well, that was it for me - I resolved then and there that no one was going to sucker ME into believing in any more invisible characters with superpowers! as I grew older, the more I learned about the histories of organized religions, the more convinced I became that (a) people around the world are extremely gullible, and (b) i need to get off my ass and start a religion of my own!

• I'm such an atheist it's not even funny, and I will punch holes into any religion if you give me half a chance. I think it's sad that people in this day and age can still be bamboozled into believing in "Holy Ghosts" and "Angels in Heaven" and the like. Everyone laughed at the Al-Quaeda idiots who believed they'd be getting 70 virgins when they got to heaven, but cripeys, Christianity looks just as silly to people of other religions!

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• Sunshine is a film that highlights the fragility of the planet and how briefly we are on it, but how much we contribute to its future. It got me thinking about life and religion, science vs religion and all that. I was verging on being an agnostic and this film confirmed any of the atheistic beliefs I had.

• As part of his research, he spent time with Brian Cox, a leading astrophysicist. Surely you don't need a knowledge of physics to play a physicist?
For us lay people, it's hard to grasp these ideas, that everything emerged from the Big Bang and nobody knows why, or what 95 per cent of the universe is made of. I was never going to understand that. When I talked to Brian, I wanted to get a brief glimpse inside his head and imagine what it means to be dealing with all these massive profound thoughts all the time, and how it affects your interaction with other people. They're building this particle accelerator, which is 25 km long and they're going to smash protons together to create the conditions of the Big Bang. But all I could do with these guys was hang out with them and ask really idiotic questions over and over...
Murphy's awe-struck tone in talking about science seems perfectly genuine. It's a real-life mirror of the awe Capa expresses when, in the film's stunning climax, he stares right into the heart of the sun, and you realise why they cast Murphy in the role - not because he makes a convincing scientist, but because he makes the perfect visionary. He even talks like one, though eloquently: While Capa would be, I'm sure, an atheist and would believe only in science, at the end of the movie he's overwhelmed by the beauty of the universe and it becomes to him something other than science. Einstein talked about 'God', and a lot of theologians latched on to that, but he wasn't talking about religion - he was talking about the way science and physics work coherently, in a beautiful and delicate system. I think Capa suddenly sees his place in the universe like that. It's not a religious thing. It's more a communion with nature.
Interview in The Independent (UK), March 31, 2007

• The Onion: Is there a God?
Angelina Jolie: Hmm... For some people. I hope so, for them. For the people who believe in it, I hope so. There doesn't need to be a God for me. There's something in people that's spiritual, that's godlike. I don't feel like doing things just because people say things, but I also don't really know if it's better to just not believe in anything, either.

• I don't believe in guilt, I believe in living on impulse as long as you never intentionally hurt another person, and don't judge people in your life. I think you should live completely free.

• Everyone got kind of crazy with me mentioning I was in love with a woman.

• If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

• There's something about death that is comforting. The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now.

• When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire.

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