Quotes

“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?”

The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.

Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.

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?

My mother was Southern Irish, and I was brought up as a devout Catholic. In fact, at one point I thought I’d become a priest, but I’d have made an appalling priest anyway… At 16, I asked all these monks some serious questions and they didn’t come up with the answers, and I just decided I didn’t believe in God.

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

That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.

To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride.

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

Hast thou reason? I have.
Why then dost not thou use it?
For if this does its own work,
what else dost thou wish?

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish (Muslim) Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.

The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women’s emancipation.

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.

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?

I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will – and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.

No Gods – No Masters.

The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women’s emancipation.

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

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

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.