Quotes

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

Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.

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

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

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

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.

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

Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.

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

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

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

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.

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.

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

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 against women’s rights and women’s freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.

ATHEISM = Liberation through Reason and Knowledge.

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 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.

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

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if no one believes it.

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.