Atheist famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Father was an atheist; he had even joined the Skeleton Army - a club of men who went about in masks or black faces, with ribald placards and a brass band, to make war upon the Salvation Army.
-- A. E. Coppard -
Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain.
-- A.C. Grayling -
It doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being - Everything is full of wonder.
-- A.C. Grayling -
If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.
-- A.J. Ayer -
It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
I am not agnostic. I am atheist. I don’t think there is no God; I know there’s no God. I know there’s no God the same way I know many other laws in our universe. I know there’s no God and I know most of the world knows that as well. They just won’t admit it because there’s another thing they know. They know they’re going to die and it freaks them out. So most people don’t have the courage to admit there’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.
-- Adam Carolla -
Screw guilt -- I could have sex with 10 men and it wouldn't bother me. I'm an atheist!
-- Adam Carolla -
I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations, mental illness clouds our judgment.
-- Adam Hamilton -
We are all given a gift of existence and of being sentient beings, and I think true happiness lies in love and compassion.
-- Adam Pascal -
By pagans the Jews (and later Christians) were seen as perverse, almost indeed as atheists, for they denied the very existence of other gods.
-- Adrian Goldsworthy -
Atheists have just as much of a right to the public discourse as any ... people of any religious faith in this country.
-- Al Gore -
I affirm my faith when I'm asked about it. But I always try to do so in a way that communicates absolute respect, not only for people who worship in a different way, but just as much respect for those who do not believe in God and who are atheists.
-- Al Gore -
They all err - Muslims, Christians, Jews and Magians. There are two kinds of humans - the intelligent, who have no religion, and the religious, who have no intellect.
-- Al-Maʿarri -
It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.
-- Alain de Botton -
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?
-- Alan Alda -
I consider myself a spiritual atheist. I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don't believe there's a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
-- Alan Lightman -
For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves. All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
-- Alan Lightman -
Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
-- Alan Watts -
Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve
-- Alasdair MacIntyre -
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
-- Albert Camus -
Je puis nier une chose sans me croire obligé de la salir ou de retirer aux autres le droit d'y croire.
-- Albert Camus -
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.
-- Albert Einstein -
It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. 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.
-- Albert Einstein -
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 -
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
-- Albert Einstein -
I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
-- Albert Einstein -
Thus I came...to a deep religiosity, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached a conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true....Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience...an attitude which has never left me.
-- Albert Einstein -
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
-- Aldous Huxley -
I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.
-- Alex Garland -
Atheists put on false courage and alacrity in the midst of their darkness and apprehensions, like children who, when they fear to go in the dark, will sing for fear.
-- Alexander Pope -
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.
-- Alexandre Dumas -
Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.
-- Alister E. McGrath -
At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble
-- Alister E. McGrath -
I'm against anything atheists represent because I believe in God.
-- Alvin Holmes -
I'm an atheist, so it was actually a joy. Spitting on Christ was a great deal of fun. I can't embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages. And that persecution still goes on today all over the world.
-- Amanda Donohoe -
Even though I don't believe in God, I feel strangely compelled to fight the atheist label.
-- Amber Heard -
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
Atheist Jews double crossers stole our [black people’s] secrets. . . . They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves . . . . Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab’s head.
-- Amiri Baraka -
I turned atheist in the 90s when India went through troubled times - communal riots, bomb blasts... Mumbai, where I live, was badly affected. I blamed religion; also, extremists on both sides - right and left.
-- Amish Tripathi -
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!
-- Anatole France -
I don't believe in God. My God is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
His [Turgot's] first important literary and scholastic effort was a treatise On the Existence of God. Few fragments of it remain, but we are helped to understand him when we learn that he asserted, and to the end of his life maintained, his belief in an Almighty Creator and Upholder of the Universe. It did, indeed, at a later period suit the purposes of his enemies, exasperated by his tolerant spirit and his reforming plans, to proclaim him an atheist; but that sort of charge has been the commonest of missiles against troublesome thinkers in all times.
-- Andrew Dickson White -
I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.
-- Andrew Schneider -
There are atheists and Christians, and there are people in both groups who are a little too heavy-handed.
-- Andy Dick -
I'd be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn't believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don't think it does.
-- Andy Rooney -
We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.
-- Andy Rooney -
I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.
-- Andy Rooney -
Why am I an atheist? I ask you: Why is anybody not an atheist? Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated. I resent anyone pushing their religion on me. I don't push my atheism on anybody else. Live and let live. Not many people practice that when it comes to religion.
-- Andy Rooney -
Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated.
-- Andy Rooney -
The nonsense about President Obama being a Muslim has got to stop. I rise to defend him from this absurd accusation by pointing out that he is obviously an atheist.
-- Ann Coulter -
Although God believers don't need evolution to be false, atheists need evolution to be true.
-- Ann Coulter -
The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.
-- Anne Rice -
…being an atheist required discipline very like that of being Catholic. One could never yield to the idea of a supernatural authority, no matter how often one might be tempted. To think that a personal God had made the world was to yield to a demonic and superstitious and destructive belief.
-- Anne Rice -
No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
-- Annie Besant -
The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is selfâ€contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God.
-- Annie Besant -
We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we're atheist.
-- Anthony Hopkins -
I’m not a religious person; I would call myself an atheist. I don’t have a good story behind it, I’m just reasonable.
-- Anthony Jeselnik -
The Atheist complains about the wind. The Christian prays for it to change. The Satanist adjusts his sails.
-- Anton Szandor LaVey -
With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.
-- Antonin Scalia -
If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic. So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition of theism.
-- Antony Flew -
Surely you do not believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?
-- Aristophanes -
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
-- Aristotle -
Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
-- Aristotle -
The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all of his perfection, creating imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.
-- Armand Salacrou -
For a "monotheistic" religion it should be sufficient with three gods.
-- Arnulf Øverland -
What is there to be said about a Church which certainly promises its believers eternal salvation, but at the same time condemns the non-believers, all those who think differently, to an eternal torment in hell? - If that Church absolutely must talk about love, then it should do so very quietly.
-- Arnulf Øverland -
Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity?
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
When you turn the discussion onto talk of religion, you will soon start to reveal a whole range of views ranging from the ardent supporter to the ardent atheist.
-- Arthur Hertzberg -
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and at the same time, all-powerful being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
An ineffably holy God, who has the utmost abhorrence of sin, was never invented by any of Adam's descendents.
-- Arthur W. Pink -
That is the whole trouble with being a heretic. One usually must think out everything for oneself.
-- Aubrey Menen -
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 -
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 -
We have Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, and their own path to grace is one that we have to revere and respect as much as our own
-- Barack Obama -
As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don't claim to know anything with certainty -- it's the believers who know it all.
-- Barbara Smoker -
Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don't find them believable.
-- Barbara Smoker -
Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.
-- Bart D. Ehrman -
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 -
My studies in Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man running in and out of every hole in the Cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.
-- Benjamin De Casseres -
The Greeks adored their gods by the simple compliment of kissing their hands; and the Romans were treated as atheists if they would not perform the same act when they entered a temple. This custom, however, as a religious ceremony declined with paganism,but was continued as a salutation by inferiors to their superiors, or as a token of esteem among friends.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
Some are Atheists by Neglect; others are so by Affectation; they, that think there is no God at some times; do not think so at all times.
-- Benjamin Whichcote -
Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme.
-- Bernard Katz -
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
-- Bertrand Russell -
An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism.
-- Bertrand Russell -
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
-- Bertrand Russell -
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
-- Bertrand Russell -
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
-- Bertrand Russell -
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
-- Bertrand Russell -
I was told that The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Modern American politicians have the same cowardice about denying an equally bloodthirsty even sillier god, Jehovah. None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist... I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.
-- Bertrand Russell
