Atheism, often misunderstood, offers a profound perspective on life, reason, and existence. Whether you're a curious seeker or a committed skeptic, exploring the thoughts and reflections of prominent atheists can be both enlightening and inspiring. This carefully curated collection of 146 inspiring atheism quotes invites you to delve into the wisdom and insights that challenge conventional beliefs and celebrate human inquiry.
1. “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” - Douglas Adams
2. “I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]” - Philip Pullman
3. “I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.[Letter to Thomas Law, 13 June 1814]” - Thomas Jefferson
4. “If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.” - Woody Allen
5. “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...” - C.S. Lewis
6. “All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.” - Marcel Duchamp
7. “I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.” - Georges Duhamel
8. “If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
9. “Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.” - Christopher Hitchens
10. “The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
11. “To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.” - Gore Vidal
12. “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
13. “I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.” - Voltairine de Cleyre
14. “I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage” - Fredrich Nietzsche
15. “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” - Albert Camus
16. “It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.” - H.L. Mencken
17. “It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.” - Sam Harris
18. “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.” - Robert M. Pirsig
19. “I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.” - Albert Einstein
20. “Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love themAnd to know that they are the wounds that make love real.His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear.His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience.I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand.I do not splash in the blood of his sonnor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh.I am a boy again--I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth.Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood.The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,I, too--and together the bread and I embrace,Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality.” - James Kavanaugh
21. “I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same fifty percent rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't...Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe...same as the voodoo lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles. It's all the same...so just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself...” - George Carlin
22. “How much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting?Better go drunk and begging round the taverns.Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yoursWill make a cup, bowl, one day a jar.When once you hear the roses are in bloom,Then is the time, my love, to pour the wine;Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell-These are but fairy-tales, forget them all.” - Omar Khayyám
23. “The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence. ” - Sam Harris
24. “The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.” - Sam Harris
25. “When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.” - Sam Harris
26. “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. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.” - Ayn Rand
27. “Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! 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 the concept.” - Dan Barker
28. “Sex has become more and more attractive because of its condemnation by priests” - Osho
29. “I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each 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.” - George Carlin
30. “I'm probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.” - Brad Pitt
31. “As Peter Berger has noted, the strategy of apologizing for Christian faith by trying to demonstrate its social utility is always eventually self-liquidating. Sooner of later people realize that a great many of the supposedly practical and secular benefits of the Christian religion can be had more easily without religion...The logic of practical atheism may well be more deeply ingrained in the evangelical tradition than conservatives perhaps have realized.” - Craig M. Gay
32. “God is a book I can no longer read.” - Floriano Martins
33. “The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.” - Michel Onfray
34. “On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it.” - Jean Paul
35. “The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.” - Rob Bell
36. “Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed. ” - Dorothy Day
37. “I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.” - Clive Barker
38. “But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.” - Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich
39. “"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.” - William Lane Craig
40. “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 responsibility 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 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.'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.” - Lance Armstrong
41. “There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not.” - Christopher Hitchens
42. “People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.” - Michael Specter
43. “Religion... has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever... If someone 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 are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I must [not] move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that'... 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 have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.” - Douglas Adams
44. “To an even moderately sophisticated and well-read person it should come as no surprise that any religion at all has its hidden as well as its obvious beauties and is capable of profound and impressive interpretations. What is deeply objectionable about most of these interpretations is that they allow the believer to say Yes while evading any No.” - Walter Kaufmann
45. “Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.” - Bede Griffiths
46. “To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?” - Christopher Hitchens
47. “Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.” - Sidney Hook
48. “Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.” - Christopher Hitchens
49. “You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [....] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.” - Ayaan Hirsi Ali
50. “In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.” - Christopher Hitchens
51. “About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.” - Christopher Hitchens
52. “The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.” - Christopher Hitchens
53. “What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.” - Christopher Hitchens
54. “I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.” - Christopher Hitchens
55. “We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.” - Christopher Hitchens
56. “It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.” - Abraham Lincoln
57. “In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.” - Christopher Hitchens
58. “En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.” - José Saramago
59. “And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.” - Christopher Hitchens
60. “It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.” - Christopher Hitchens
61. “What I have a problem with is not so much religion or god, but faith. When you say you believe something in your heart and therefore you can act on it, you have completely justified the 9/11 bombers. You have justified Charlie Manson. If it's true for you, why isn't it true for them? Why are you different? If you say "I believe there's an all-powerful force of love in the universe that connects us all, and I have no evidence of that but I believe it in my heart," then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that Sharon Tate deserves to die. It's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that you need to fly planes into buildings for Allah.” - Penn Jillette
62. “The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. . . Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. . . Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.” - Pema Chodron
63. “Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there's a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There's just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us.” - Penn Jillette
64. “By Hays' reasoning, penetrating a rectum with a penis is a violation of how God meant humans to function. However, penetrating a human body with a sword, a common way to kill people in biblical times, is acceptable. Apparently human bodies were designed to be penetrated by metal implements, but not by flesh.” - Hector Avalos
65. “Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.” - Jon Krakauer
66. “So. You get handed a holy sword by an archangel, told to go fight the forces of evil, and you somehow remain an atheist. Is that what you're saying?” - Jim Butcher
67. “In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.” - Terry Eagleton
68. “I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
69. “Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated” - Christopher Hitchens
70. “The Garden of LoveI went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.” - William Blake
71. “I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.” - Stephen Hawking
72. “I was not an atheist. Few people really are, for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere.” - Bill Wilson
73. “I’m an atheist, and a militant atheist when religion starts impacting on legislation.” - Daniel Radcliffe
74. “However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!” - Friedrich Nietzsche
75. “When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*” - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
76. “Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
77. “Of course what I'm about to share isn't true for me but...Friends, somebody said, are "god's apology for relations." (p. 129)” - Christopher Hitchens
78. “Religion doesn't just cloud our minds. It asks us to deliberately deceive ourselves-- to replace reason with its opposite, faith. And when men operate on faith, they can no longer be reasoned with, which makes them more dangerous than any sane man, good or evil.” - James L. Sutter
79. “Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?” - Doug Wright
80. “Nothing draws people more quickly away from religion than an open mind.” - Hemant Mehta
81. “Love and respect all people. Hate and destroy all faith.” - Penn Jillette
82. “The sight of her made him understand why he'd lost his faith in God.” - Sarah Langan
83. “I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true.” - Andy Rooney
84. “First the priests arrive. Then the conquistadores.” - James Clavell
85. “On the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists.” - Terry Pratchett
86. “If you ask the religious person "What do you believe in?" he will tell you about one thing. But if you ask him "What do you not believe in?" he will tell you about many, many things! And if you ask an atheist "What do you believe in?" he will say "Nothing." The only difference between an atheist and a religious person, is one thing. If one thing isn't there, there would be no difference at all! When I say I am losing my religion, I am not saying that I'm losing my belief; but I am saying that I'm losing my disbeliefs.” - C. JoyBell C.
87. “Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.” - Bill Gaede
88. “The bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women's emancipation.” - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
89. “For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.” - G.K. Chesterton
90. “You don’t have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is “I don’t know”.” - Penn Jillette
91. “The world holds two classes of men--intelligent men without religion, and religious men withoutintelligence.poet” - ~ Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri, 973-1057, Syrian
92. “[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky
93. “Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.” - Baron d'Holbach
94. “if you truly want to know why I'm helping you, you won't get any easy answers. It's not because I believe in the goodness of humankind. It's not because I believe God and the rest of the monsters are evil. I only wish to have the capacity to change. To know that we have the ability to take a different direction than the one presented to us. That is more important than good and evil. Than life or death.” - Autumn Christian
95. “...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing, but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.” - David Foster Wallace
96. “Why should I have to hide the fact that I don't believe there’s a supreme being? There’s no proof of it. There’s no harm in saying you’re an atheist. It doesn't mean you treat people any differently. I live by the Golden Rule to do unto others, as you'd want to be treated.I just simply don't believe in religion, and I don’t believe necessarily that there’s a supreme being that watches over all of us. I follow the teachings of George Carlin. George said he worshipped the sun. He was a fellow atheist. I’m in good company … Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Charles Darwin. It’s not like I’m not with good company and intelligent people. There have been some good, intelligent atheists who have lived in the world.” - Jesse Ventura
97. “I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…” - David Attenborough
98. “What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!” - Friedrich Nietzsche
99. “For those in love with an illusion often refuse to accept reality” - Sanal Edamaruku
100. “With the first jolt he was in daylight; they had left the gateways of King’s Cross, and were under blue sky. Tunnels followed, and after each the sky grew bluer, and from the embankment at Finsbury Park he had his first sight of the sun. It rolled along behind the eastern smokes — a wheel, whose fellow was the descending moon — and as yet it seemed the servant of the blue sky, not its lord. He dozed again. Over Tewin Water it was day. To the left fell the shadow of the embankment and its arches; to the right Leonard saw up into the Tewin Woods and towards the church, with its wild legend of immortality. Six forest trees — that is a fact — grow out of one of the graves in Tewin churchyard. The grave’s occupant — that is the legend — is an atheist, who declared that if God existed, six forest trees would grow out of her grave. These things in Hertfordshire; and farther afield lay the house of a hermit — Mrs. Wilcox had known him — who barred himself up, and wrote prophecies, and gave all he had to the poor. While, powdered in between, were the villas of business men, who saw life more steadily, though with the steadiness of the half-closed eye. Over all the sun was streaming, to all the birds were singing, to all the primroses were yellow, and the speedwell blue, and the country, however they interpreted her, was uttering her cry of “now. ” She did not free Leonard yet, and the knife plunged deeper into his heart as the train drew up at Hilton. But remorse had become beautiful.” - E.M. Forster
101. “Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.” - Robert W. Cox
102. “The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung's death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation. North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It's called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin's protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it's considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.” - Christopher Hitchens
103. “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...” - Ayn Rand
104. “Digo-te, ó sagrado Baal do céu, que não existes. Mas, se existisses, eu te amaldiçoaria de tal modo que esse teu céu palpitaria com o fogo do inferno. Em verdade te digo: ofereci-te meus serviços e tu os recusaste; repeliste-me, e hoje eu te viro as costas para sempre, pois nunca soubeste conhecer a hora da Visitação. Em verdade te digo: sei que vou morrer, e, não obstante, com a morte diante dos olhos, eu te desprezo, ó celeste Ápis. Empregaste contra mim a força, e não sabes que jamais me dobrei perante a adversidade. Pois deverias sabê-lo. Por acaso dormias quando plasmaste meu coração? Em verdade te digo: durante toda a vida, cada gota de sangue em minhas veias sentirá alegria em desprezar-te e escarnecer de tua Graça. A partir deste momento, renuncio a ti, a tuas pompas e tuas obras; lançarei o anátema sobre meu pensamento, se jamais ele te pensar; arrancarei os lábios se jamais eles pronunciarem teu nome. Se existires, digo-te a última palavra da vida e da morte: digo-te adeus. Depois, calo-me, viro-te as costas e sigo meu caminho.” - Knut Hamsun
105. “The vulgar modern argument used against religion, and lately against common decency, would be absolutely fatal to any idea of liberty. It is perpetually said that because there are a hundred religions claiming to be true, it is therefore impossible that one of them should really be true. The argument would appear on the face of it to be illogical, if anyone nowadays troubled about logic. It would be as reasonable to say that because some people thought the earth was flat, and others (rather less incorrectly) imagined it was round, and because anybody is free to say that it is triangular or hexagonal, or a rhomboid, therefore it has no shape at all; or its shape can never be discovered; and, anyhow, modern science must be wrong in saying it is an oblate spheroid. The world must be some shape, and it must be that shape and no other; and it is not self-evident that nobody can possibly hit on the right one. What so obviously applies to the material shape of the world equally applies to the moral shape of the universe. The man who describes it may not be right, but it is no argument against his rightness that a number of other people must be wrong.” - G.K. Chesterton
106. “You do not have to worhip god to be good and you certainly do not have to be good to worship god.” - Chris Decker
107. “Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.” - Fulton J. Sheen
108. “I don't want to believe. I want to know.” - Carl Sagan
109. “When Jesus said “Whoever eats my flesh & drinks my blood has eternal life” John 6:54 He was CLEARLY talking to Zombies & Vampires” - Pablo
110. “Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.” - Cesar Nascimento
111. “You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [...] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'.” - Terry Pratchett
112. “(Marlowe's) Faustus stubbornly reverts to his atheistic beliefs and continues his elementary pagan re-education ~ the inferno to him is a 'place' invented by men.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
113. “Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.” - Richard Rohr
114. “Во многих случаях для того, чтобы хоть как-то функционировать, мы вынуждены полагаться на информацию из третьих рук. Я принимаю на веру слова врача, ученого, фермера. Мне это не нравится. Я вынужден это делать потому, что они обладают живым знанием, которого я лишен. Я согласен жить и пользоваться чужими знаниями о состоянии моих почек, о роли холестерина, о разведении кур; но когда речь идет о смысле и цели жизни и смерти, то информация из третьих рук меня не устраивает. Я не согласен жить чьей-то верой в чьего-то Бога.” - Alan Jones
115. “بحكم المنطق الداخلي للأشياء يتوازى كل من التطور و الحضارةو العلم والطوبيا مع الإلحاد، بينما يتوازى الخلق والثقافة و الفن و الأخلاق مع الدين.” - علي عزت بيجوفيتش
116. “In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any actual data for his assertions. They are nothing more than the mild musings of a wealthy British man, pondering the state of humanity’s soul between his sips of tea. Had Lewis actually famil- iarized himself with real human beings of the secular sort, per- haps sat and talked with them, he would have had to reconsider this notion. As so many apostates explained to me, morality is most certainly possible beyond the confines of faith. Can people be good without God? Can a moral orientation be sustained and developed outside of a religious context? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes.” - Phil Zuckerman
117. “For a God that created everything, it is mystifying why he created so much competition.” - Trevor Treharne
118. “No man will say, "There is no God" 'till he is so hardened in sin that it hasbecome his interest that there should be none to call him to account.” - Matthew Henry
119. “Given the level of understanding and the fact that they believed already in a set of myths and superstitions, it was the easiest and fastest way to proceed.” - Mario Stinger
120. “Remember, faith is the harbinger of chaos.” - Lionel Suggs
121. “Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.” - Gore Vidal
122. “For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.” - Thomas Hobbes
123. “I want to be a woman who lives totally abandoned to the first commandment: to love my Lord, my God, with all my heart. I don’t want the reputation that I love God, I don’t want to write songs about loving God, I don’t want to talk about loving God. I want to actually love God. When I close my eyes, I want my heart to move. When I close my eyes and I look at Him, I want to feel alive on the inside. I want to look at Him with a fire in my heart and it’s real.” - Misty Edwards
124. “Of all the major religions, or lack thereof, the atheist's is one of the best pretenders: his foundation for all existences, as well as moral behaviors for the permanent good of mankind, begins at science but ends at himself, the Napoleon complex of both intelligence and imagination. On the other hand the anti-theist wouldn't survive without a deity beyond himself to hunt. He doesn't pretend, he simply nullifies his own position.” - Criss Jami
125. “Catholicism - all the perversions of Christianity - is not a faith of love. It is a faith of fear. Obey, be good, toe the line, and heaven is yours, the first prize in the lottery of eternity. Disobey, react, cut the lifeline, and never-ceasing damnation is the booby prize. The dogma is, love the only god and you shall be safe. Fail in that love and he will not rescue you, not until you crawl and apologize and fawn before the altar. What kind of a religion demands such indignity?” - Martin Booth
126. “GERTRUDEGertrude Appleman, 1901-1976God is all-knowing, all-present, and almighty. --A Catechism of Christian DoctrineI wish that all the peoplewho peddle Godcould watch my mother die:could see the skin andgristle weighing onlyseventy-nine, every stubbornpound of flesh a smalldeath.I wish the people who peddle Godcould see her young,lovely in gardens andbeautiful in kitchens, and could watchthe hand of God slowlytwisting her knees and fingerstill they gnarled and knotted, settling infor thirty years of pain.I wish the people who peddle Godcould see the lightningof His cancer stabbingher, that small frametensing at every shock,her sweet contralto scratchy withthe Lord’s infection: Philip,I want to die.I wish I had them gathered round,those preachers, popes, rabbis,imams, priests – everypious shill on God’s payroll – and Iwould pull the sheets from my mother’s brittle body,and they would fall on their knees at her bedsideto be forgiven all theirfaith.” - Philip Appleman
127. “Last-Minute Message For a Time CapsuleI have to tell you this, whoever you are:that on one summer morning here, the oceanpounded in on tumbledown breakers,a south wind, bustling along the shore,whipped the froth into little rainbows,and a reckless gull swept down the beachas if to fly were everything it needed.I thought of your hovering saucers,looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,so it wouldn't be lost forever - -that once upon a time we hadmeadows here, and astonishing things,swans and frogs and luna mothsand blue skies that could stagger your heart.We could have had them still,and welcomed you to earth, butwe also had the righteous oneswho worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.When you go home to your shining galaxy,say that what you learnedfrom this dead and barren place isto beware the righteous ones.” - Philip Appleman
128. “This is the only real revelation — that God is only a trick with mirrors, our dark reflection in a glass.” - Philip Appleman
129. “God must have a weird sense of values, and if there’s a Judgment Day, as some folks think, He’s going to have a lot to answer for.” - Philip Appleman
130. “Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition.” - Ricky Gervais
131. “When I finally applied logic to Religion that was when I quit paying after life insurance and quit going” - Stanley Victor Paskavich
132. “…the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.” - Richard Dawkins
133. “Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.” - Gore Vidal
134. “If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.” - Salman Rushdie
135. “Atheist’s denial of God’s existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist’s claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God’s existence.” - Paul Copan
136. “[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.” - Arthur Miller
137. “When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlesseness - until redeemed - the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state.” - Arthur Miller
138. “Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.” - Frederick Buechner
139. “As all men are touched by God’s love, so all are also touched by the desire for His intimacy. No one escapes this longing; we are all kings in exile, miserable without the Infinite. Those who reject the grace of God have a desire to avoid God, as those who accept it have a desire for God. The modern atheist does not disbelieve because of his intellect, but because of his will; it is not knowledge that makes him an atheist…The denial of God springs from a man’s desire not to have a God—from his wish that there were no Justice behind the universe, so that his injustices would fear not retribution; from his desire that there be no Law, so that he may not be judged by it; from his wish that there were no Absolute Goodness, that he might go on sinning with impunity. That is why the modern atheist is always angered when he hears anything said about God and religion—he would be incapable of such a resentment if God were only a myth. His feeling toward God is the same as that which a wicked man has for one whom he has wronged: he wishes he were dead so that he could do nothing to avenge the wrong. The betrayer of friendship knows his friend exists, but he wished he did not; the post-Christian atheist knows God exists, but he desires He should not.” - Fulton J. Sheen
140. “Our assholes will be clean but we must never wash our hands. Our immune systems will be strengthened by our being dirty. Not filthy. Just mildly grimy. Filthy fingernails have always been a favorite fashion accessory of mine. Especially when you place your hands in the prayer positions. Matter of fact, I urge all my followers to forgo nail polish permanently and replace it with expertly applied soot. The nonexistent gods above will ignore our prayers better this way.” - John Waters
141. “If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests.” - Baron D. Holbach
142. “Obsoletes and absolutes are the stock in trade of religions that place their faith in an 'unchanging' god while faced with the reality of an ever-changing world.” - Stifyn Emrys
143. “The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels, and divine intervention.” - Chris Hedges
144. “Jesus was crucified for doing nothingAnd God is worshiped for even less.” - Porcupine Tree
145. “People consider Islam as the best religion of world; I wonder if best of them is that much worse, I am really proud of being an Atheist.” - M.F.Moonzajer
146. “I am an atheist but I promise whenever there is complete freedom of religion I would worship you as my private and individual God.” - M.F.Moonzajer
