Frei Betto famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed, between those who want to keep this unjust society and those who want to struggle for justice.
-- Frei Betto

#Atheist #Struggle #Men
It is the bourgeoisie which has turned religion into an opium of the people by preaching a God, lord of the heavens only, while taking possession of the earth for itself.
-- Frei Betto

#People #Heaven #Earth

I am not agnostic. I am atheist. I donâ€™t think there is no God; I know thereâ€™s no God. I know thereâ€™s no God the same way I know many other laws in our universe. I know thereâ€™s no God and I know most of the world knows that as well. They just wonâ€™t admit it because thereâ€™s another thing they know. They know theyâ€™re going to die and it freaks them out. So most people donâ€™t have the courage to admit thereâ€™s no God and they know it. They feel it. They try to suppress it. And if you bring it up they get angry because it freaks them out.
By pagans the Jews (and later Christians) were seen as perverse, almost indeed as atheists, for they denied the very existence of other gods.
I still don't like the word agnostic. It's too fancy. I'm simply not a believer. But, as simple as this notion is, it confuses some people. Someone wrote a Wikipedia entry about me, identifying me as an atheist because I'd said in a book I wrote that I wasn't a believer. I guess in a world uncomfortable with uncertainty, an unbeliever must be an atheist, and possibly an infidel. This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people's holding beliefs other than their own?
At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.
This human struggle and scramble for office, for a way to live without work, will finally test the strength of our institutions.
Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.
All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral philosophy. All the men I've ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the war.
Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
Therefore, since the world has still Much good, but much less good than ill, And while the sun and moon endure Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure, I'd face it as a wise man would, And train for ill and not for good.

Frei Betto famous quotes

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