Atheism famous quotes
03-24-2025
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Even the Atheists ... readily acknowledge it for an indubitable truth, that there must be something ... which was never made or produced -- and which therefore is the cause of those other things that are made, something ... whose existence must needs be necessary.... Wherefore all the question now is, what is this ... self-existent thing, which is the cause of all other things that are made.
-- Ralph Cudworth -
Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.
-- Raoul Vaneigem -
To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge
-- Ravi Zacharias -
The loneliest moment in life is when you have just experienced that which you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has just let you down.
-- Ravi Zacharias -
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has a more direct bearing on the moral choices made by individuals or the purposes pursued by society than belief or disbelief in God.
-- Ravi Zacharias -
Most atheists bristle at the thought that atheism has anything to do with faith, but not Penn Jillette.
-- Ray Comfort -
The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.
-- Raymond Aron -
Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.
-- Raymond Aron -
Astronomy ... is of all others the science which seems to present to us the most striking instance of waste in nature.
-- Richard A. Proctor -
Would the atheist continue such, let him beware how he admits Love into his breast: for God will surely come along with him.
-- Richard B. Garnett -
The Christian religion is so manifestly contrary to the facts, belief in it can only be held with the most delusional gerrymandering imaginable.
-- Richard Carrier -
Reason bases its decisions on evidence available to everyone, and allows people to disagree when evidence is lacking. Religion will never do that.
-- Richard Carrier -
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
-- Richard Dawkins -
A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it...
-- Richard Dawkins -
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think...
-- Richard Dawkins -
There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
-- Richard Dawkins -
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.
-- Richard Dawkins -
I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.
-- Richard Dawkins -
To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.
-- Richard Dawkins -
I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.
-- Richard Dawkins -
I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
-- Richard Dawkins -
Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.
-- Richard Dawkins -
To fill a world with ... religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
-- Richard Dawkins -
I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes and that's because I am passionate about the truth. ... I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans.
-- Richard Dawkins -
…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 -
We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
-- Richard Dawkins -
We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.
-- Richard Dawkins -
A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.
-- Richard K. Morgan -
The whole story is about change. We are very lucky that the earth's history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the changes. Unfortunately, there will always be gaps in our knowledge, but there is no doubt that we and everything living today has evolved.
-- Richard Leakey -
I have been raised to believe in freedom of thought and speech. If a minority wishes to accept that position it's their right. What I fear is that this minority may seem to be larger than it truly is. What is strange is that there are still people who believe the world is not a globe.
-- Richard Leakey -
Their moral influence will then do infinitely more to advance the true interests of religion, than any measures which they may call on Congress to enact.
-- Richard Mentor Johnson -
Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong... As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from...
-- Richard P. Feynman -
It is atheism to pray and not wait on hope.
-- Richard Sibbes -
We are weak little Davids. But we are stronger than the Goliath of atheism, because God is on our side. The truth belongs to us.
-- Richard Wurmbrand -
Hollywood and Disneyland are the legacy of Europe's cultural imperialism. We gave them nursery rhymes and they gave back film. Televised riots are as American as Barbie/ Big Macs. Tomorrow the riots will be forgotten but Mickey mouse will still be there. Welcome to Disneyland.
-- Richey Edwards -
Opinions don't affect facts. But facts should affect opinions, and do, if you're rational
-- Ricky Gervais -
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 -Â- 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 -
Atheism is a belief systemâ€, is like saying “not going skiing, is a hobby.
-- Ricky Gervais -
For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.
-- Robert A. Heinlein -
Religion and science, then, in my analysis are the two great sister forces which have pulled, and are still pulling, mankind onward and upward.
-- Robert Andrews Millikan -
To me it is unthinkable that a real atheist could be a scientist.
-- Robert Andrews Millikan -
God [is] the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion.
-- Robert Boyle -
'Tis well averred, A scientific faith's absurd.
-- Robert Browning -
The candid incline to surmise of late that the Christian faith proves false.
-- Robert Browning -
Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.
-- Robert Browning -
Atheism can never be an institution ... it can never be more than a destitution.
-- Robert Collyer -
An ideology can be defined as a group of beliefs that individuals borrow; most people borrow an ideology by identifying with a social group ... with a body of sacred documents and heroes.
-- Robert E Lane -
If you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, not to accept the argument is to act irrationally.
-- Robert F. Almeder -
Anything more than the truth would be too much.
-- Robert Frost -
Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll -
Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth - each of the other.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll -
It is told that the great Angelo, in decorating a church, painted some angels wearing sandals. A cardinal looking at the picture said to the artist: Whoever saw angels with sandals? Angelo answered with another question: Whoever saw an angel barefooted?
-- Robert Green Ingersoll -
As long as every question is answered by the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply impossible.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll -
Either god should have written a book to fit my brain, or he should have made my brain to fit his book.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll -
There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?
-- Robert J. Sawyer -
What is the ultimate solution to the origin of the Universe? The answers provided by the astronomers are disconcerting and remarkable. Most remarkable of all is the fact that in science, as in the Bible, the world begins with an act of creation.
-- Robert Jastrow -
All of science is built on territory once occupied by gods. Is there some boundary at which science is supposed to stop?
-- Robert L. Park -
Mass Man, the universal psychopath, is born when the individual ego is weakened to the point at which it loses separate identity and is forced, for security, to merge with the mass.
-- Robert M. Lindner -
The very admission of the need to harmonize is an admission that the burden of proof is on the narratives, not on those who doubt them. What harmonizing shows is that despite appearances, the texts still might be true.
-- Robert M. Price -
The piety of "having a personal relationship with Christ" ... is alien to the New Testament... but evangelicals elevate it to the shibboleth of salvation! Unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus, buster, one day you will be boiling in Hell. Sheesh! Talk about the fury of a personal savior scorned!
-- Robert M. Price -
"You ask me how I know he lives?" asks the revival chorus. "He lives within my heart." Exactly! A figment.
-- Robert M. Price -
If, when we compare two versions of a story, the second known to be a retelling of the first, and find that the second has more of a miraculous element, we may reasonably conclude we have legendary (or midrashic or whatever) embellishment. The tale has grown in the telling. This sort of comparison is common in extrabiblical research and no one holds that it cannot properly indicate legend formation there.
-- Robert M. Price -
"Heresy," by the way, simply means "choice." It came to mean "thoughtcrime," implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you.
-- Robert M. Price -
I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith.
-- Robert M. Price -
It is now becoming clear that everything can - and probably did - come from nothing.
-- Robert Matthews -
The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It's the party of non-voters.
-- Robert Reich -
I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14. I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism.
-- Rupert Sheldrake -
The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it.
-- Ruth Hurmence Green -
Today when the Fundamentalists are once more insisting that the fundamentals of fundamentalism are fundamental to our being No. 1 on the Lord's totem pole, it's very brave of you to invite the "resident atheist" of mid-Missouri to share her thoughts with you.
-- Ruth Hurmence Green -
But I still don't know what kind of monster was this god, until I saw that Jesus deliberately hid his light under a bushel. "Tell no one" was often his command.
-- Ruth Hurmence Green -
The Bible, itself the ultimate curse, is an in-depth profile of the divine spleen.
-- Ruth Hurmence Green -
I am fond of saying that reading the Bible turned me into an atheist.
-- Ruth Hurmence Green -
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts
-- Saint Peter -
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
-- Salman Rushdie -
Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
-- Salman Rushdie -
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
-- Salman Rushdie -
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle.
-- Sam Harris -
How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?
-- Samuel Beckett -
Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.
-- Samuel Beckett -
Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.
-- Samuel Johnson -
A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn't exist, guess what? Neither do true friends.
-- Scott Dikkers -
Here, no mercy is shown. One hates one's fellow man to the glory of God.
-- Selma Lagerlöf -
Far from being an aberration that is not representative of Christianity, the persecution of heretics follows logically from the connection of faith and salvation as presented by Jesus in the Gospels.
-- Shadia Drury -
Religious freedom in an open society has the best prospects of flourishing to the extent that it expresses itself as freedom of religious inquiry.
-- Sidney Hook -
To deny me the right to err is therefore to deny me the right to believe.
-- Sidney Hook -
When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
-- Sigmund Freud -
The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.
-- Sigmund Freud
