"A man without a god is like a fish without a bicycle."
..........Adapted from a quotation of feminist Gloria Steinem
"Killing for peace is like fucking for chastity"
..........Author Unknow
"If, as they say, God spanked this town
For being much too frisky,
Why did He burn His churches down
And save Hotaling's Whiskey?"
.........[Poem on 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, in which the city's largest whiskey distillery was left unscathed]
"If god doesn't like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you."
There are none more ignorant and useless, than they that seek answers on their knees, with their eyes closed.
Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject.
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
To the philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
The mind of the fundamentalist is like the pupil of the eye: the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.
Theology: The study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas.
"Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect would otherwise cause you to reject -- otherwise there's no need for faith."
Humanity's first sin was faith; the first virtue was doubt.
Any belief worth having must survive doubt.
"Organized religion is like organized crime; it preys on peoples' weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate."
..........Author Unknown
"I am treated as evil by those who feel persecuted because they are not allowed to force me to believe as they do."
..........author unknown
"A society without religion is like a crazed psychopath without a .45."
..........Author Unknown
"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."
..........Author Unknown
"Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life."
..........Author Unknown
"'God is as real as I am', the old man said. I was relieved since I knew Santa wouldn't lie to me..."
..........Author Unknown
"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish."
..........Author Unknown
"Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends."
..........Woody Allen
"When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite."
..........William Blake
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
..........Derek Bok - Harvard President
"Confession without repentance is just bragging."
..........Rev. Eugene Bolton
"Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion."
..........Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D.
Imagine the ego of the human race, to consider themselves so grand, as to warrant a creator worthy of praise.
..........Robert Brunswick Jr.
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
..........Charles Bukowski
"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."
..........Arthur C. Clarke
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."
..........Chapman Cohen
"I do not believe in god because I do not believe in Mother Goose."
..........Clarence Darrow
"I've been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition."
..........Richard Dawkins
"I think; therefore I am."
..........Rene Descartes
"Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing."
..........John Dewey
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
..........Philip K. Dick
"I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world."
..........Charles Dickens
Asked soon after Carl's death:
"Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?"
She responded, "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know."
..........Ann Druyan (Carl Sagan's wife)
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
..........Thomas Edison
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; 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
"The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so, cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, than they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?"
..........Epicures, 300 B.C.
"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing"
..........Anatole France
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
..........Ben Franklin Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758
"Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?"
..........Jules Feiffer
"Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition."
..........Freedom From Religion Foundation
"In the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is only too palpable."
..........Sigmund Freud
"We dance around in a ring and suppose, while the secret sits in the middle and knows."
..........Robert Frost
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect, had intended for us to forgo their use."
..........Galileo Galilei
"See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly."
..........Homer, The Odyssey
"Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe."
..........Thomas Henry Huxley
"Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme."
..........Bernard Katz
"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice."
..........Pres. John F. Kennedy
"Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking."
..........John Maynard Keynes
"The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window."
..........Stephen King
"Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness."
..........Fran Lebowitz
"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church."
..........Ferdinand Magellan
"I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance."
..........Christopher Marlowe
"It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women."
..........Marquis de Sade
"Religion is the opiate of the masses."
..........Karl Marx
"Anail Nathrach Uatha Bha'is Bith Thonn Du'iseacnt Le De'anamh E!..."
(Serpent's breath Death's Cave and Waves of Being Awaken with making!)
..........Merlin
"I have my own God, and I think my God finds me incredibly fucking funny. That's why I chose him as my God ... "
..........Dennis Miller
"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
..........Wilson Mizner
"One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case, and never has been."
..........John Neuhaus, in San Jose Mercury News
The last Christian died on a cross.
..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."
..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."
..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day."
..........Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Religion has caused more misery to all men in every state of human history than any other single idea."
..........Madelyn Murray O'Hair
"No God ever gave any man anything, nor ever answered any prayer at any time -- nor ever will."
..........Madelyn Murray O'Hair
"The only force more devastating than a nuclear holocaust is a group of Christians fresh out of church."
..........Matt Polek
"Better to be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of all misfortune."
..........Plato
"Thanks for the job, Mickey."
..........Pluto
"I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods you will understand why I dismiss yours."
..........Stephen F. Roberts
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."
..........Gene Roddenberry
"Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character,"
..........W.T. Root, Prof. of Psychology at Univ. of Pittsburgh, after examining 1,916 prisoners.
"It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so."
..........Ernestine Rose
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death...Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
..........Bertrand Russell
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
..........Carl Sagan
"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking."
..........Carl Sagan --The Demon-Haunted World
"The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."
..........Carl Sagan --Billions and Billions
"This above all: to thine own self be true."
..........William Shakespeare (Polonius)
"The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose."
..........William Shakespeare
"All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few."
..........Stendhal
"I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock."
..........Howard Stern
"It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous."
..........Gloria Steinem
"I was getting tired about what the preacher called Christian. Anything he did was Christian, and the people in the church believed it, too. If he stole some book he didn't like from the library, or made the radio station play only part of the day on Sunday, or took somebody off to the state poor home, he called it Christian. I never had much religious training, and I never went to Sunday school because we didn't belong to the church when I was old enough to go, but I thought I knew what believing in Christ meant, and it wasn't half the things the preacher did."
..........John Kennedy Toole -- The Neon Bible
"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying."
..........Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."
..........Horace Walpole
"When it comes to a choice between two evils, I always choose the one I haven't tried before."
..........Mae West
"Truth in matters of religion is simply the opinion that has survived."
..........Oscar Wilde
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
..........Oscar Wilde
"I was driving alone one day and I saw a hitchhiker with a sign saying Heaven. So I hit him."
..........Steven Wright
"Fundamentalists are like the fir trees in German forests: they cannot stand alone, and are only stable when crowded together, branches locked with those of their brothers. That is why we must always fear them, because they will always hate us for our individualism."
..........Brent Yaciw
"If the lord had meant us to have faith, he'd have given us lobotomies."
..........Zlatko