Quotes
Atheist & Free Thinker Quotes (Sorted by Author’s First Name)
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. — Aldous Huxley
You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. — Anne Lamott
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; give a man a religion and he'll starve to death praying for a fish. — Anonymous
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. — Arthur C. Clarke
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. — Baruch Spinoza
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. — Benjamin Franklin
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. — Benjamin Franklin
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. — Bertrand Russell
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. — Bertrand Russell
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. — Bertrand Russell
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. — Carl Sagan
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. — Carl Sagan
You cannot convince a believer of anything, for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe. — Carl Sagan
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. — Carl Sagan
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas. — Carl Sagan
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. — Carl Sagan
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. — Carl Sagan
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. — Carl Sagan
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or politics, but it is not the path to knowledge. — Carl Sagan
Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. — Carl Sagan
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? — Carl Sagan
Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? — Carl Sagan
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. — Carl Sagan
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star-stuff. — Carl Sagan
Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, honestly. — Carl Sagan
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. — Carl Sagan
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. — Chapman Cohen
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. — Christopher Hitchens
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. — Christopher Hitchens
The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike. — Delos McKown
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. — David Hume
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. — Edward Abbey
The most violent element in society is ignorance. — Emma Goldman
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. — Epicurus
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright
Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche
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
Atheism is a non-prophet organization. — George Carlin
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. — George Bernard Shaw
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. — H.P. Lovecraft
The church tries to control by defining what is right and wrong, but the mind must be free to think without limits. — Hypatia
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty. — Ilka Chase
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. — Isaac Asimov
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. — Isaac Asimov
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. — Katharine Hepburn
Religion is the dream of the human mind. — Ludwig Feuerbach
An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair
A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and turned out for what he knows. — Mark Twain
Faith is believing what you know ain’t so. — Mark Twain
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog. — Mark Twain
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. — Michel de Montaigne
If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced? — Percy Bysshe Shelley
The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. — Richard Burton
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. — Richard Dawkins
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. — Richard Dawkins
There is no such thing as a Christian child, only a child of Christian parents. — Richard Dawkins
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. — Richard Dawkins
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. — Richard Dawkins
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. — Richard Dawkins
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any society, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes. — Salman Rushdie
We have a choice: blind faith in institutions that have failed us, or a new way forward, grounded in reason and evidence. — Sam Harris
He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect more than Christianity, and end in loving himself more than all. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful. — Seneca
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. — Stephen Hawking
There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works. — Stephen Hawking
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. — Steven Weinberg
All national institutions of churches appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind. — Thomas Paine
The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed. — Thomas Paine
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. — Thomas Paine
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. — Thomas Jefferson
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. — Voltaire
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. — Voltaire
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. — Voltaire
When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it. — Oscar Wilde