Great Minds ... by Layth Barzangi

Great Minds.
Inspiring quotes from the minds of humanity's greatest thinkers.

An agglomeration of ageless wisdom and a labor of love by Layth Barzangi.

Last updated on 24 Aug 2008
Hit 500 quotes mark on 10 Jan 2007!
Hit 600 quotes mark on 01 Sep 2007!

Retrieved a total of 148 authors and 618 quotes.

Adams, John (1735-1826)
Second President of the United States (1797-1801).

When philosophic reason is clear and certain by intuition or necessary induction, no subsequent revelation supported by prophecies or miracles can supersede it.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.
Freethought • Secular Humanism

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.
Religion/Faith

The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.
Nature • Religion/Faith

al-Ma'arri, Abu-al-Ala (973-1057)
Arabic poet and philosopher.

The world holds two classes of men—intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

As for religion, all men unquestioningly accept the creed of their fathers out of habit, incapable of distinguishing the true from the false.
Religion/Faith

Religion is a fable invented by the ancients, worthless except for those who exploit the credulous masses.
Religion/Faith

Religions have only resulted in bigotry and bloodshed, with sect fighting sect, and fanatics forcing their beliefs onto people at the point of a sword. All religions are contrary to reason and sanity.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Allen, Ethan (1738-1789)
American Revolutionary.

In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; But in those parts of it that are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith • Science

Allen, Steve (1921-2000)
American musician, comedian, writer and original host of the The Tonight Show (1953-1957).

Once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are suprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.
Religion/Faith

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
Reason/Rationality

Anthony, Susan B. (1820-1906)
American feminist leader and suffragist.

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.
God • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Ethics • God • Religion/Faith

Archer, William (1856-1924)
Scottish critic.

I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring.
God

Theocracy has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained tyranny.
Religion/Faith

Aristotle (ca. 384-322 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
God

Asimov, Isaac (1920-1992)
Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
Religion/Faith • Secular Humanism

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
God • Religion/Faith

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."
Science

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
Religion/Faith • Science

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
Reason/Rationality • Science

Attenborough, Sir David Frederick (b. 1926)
World renown British broadcaster and naturalist. Widely considered one of the pioneers of the nature documentary, he has written and presented eight major series surveying nearly every aspect of life on Earth.

I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, "Well presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action, and therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Nature

Bacon, Sir Francis (1561-1626)
English philosopher and statesman, one of the pioneers of modern scientific thought.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not, but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Ethics • Religion/Faith

Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814-1876)
Russian anarchist and political theorist.

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.
Religion/Faith

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
God • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
God • Liberty/Freedom

God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Liberty/Freedom

Religion is a collective insanity.
Religion/Faith

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Liberty/Freedom

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.
God • Religion/Faith

Baldwin, James A. (1924-1987)
American writer and outspoken critic of racism.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
Nature • Religion/Faith

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Liberty/Freedom

Barker, Dan (b. 1949)
American author and critic, former preacher, co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
Religion/Faith

Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god -- both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter.
Atheism/Agnosticism

If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?
God • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Prayer never changes the laws of nature.
Nature • Religion/Faith

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, "Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
Science

Some theists, observing that all "effects" need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove.
God • Reason/Rationality

Theists claim that there is a god; atheists do not. Religionists often challenge atheists to prove that there is no god; but this misses the point. Atheists claim god is unproved, not disproved. In any argument, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. If a person claims to have invented an antigravity device, it is not incumbent on others to prove that no such thing exists. The believer must make a case. Everyone else is justified in refusing to believe until evidence is produced and substantiated. Some atheists feel the argument is pointless until the term "god" is made understandable. Words like "spirit" and "supernatural" have no referent in reality, and ideas like "all-knowing" and "omnipotent" are self-contradictory. Why discuss a meaningless concept?
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Religious claims have not withstood the tests of reason. 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.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil--you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Reason/Rationality

There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling -- absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.
Freethought

Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.
Freethought • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Berry, Matt
American author and philosopher.

Faith is the fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God's integrity instead of one's own.
Religion/Faith

In response to the fear of our unknowable future we would rather freeze ourselves into a single stage of growth at the expense of the entire metamorphosis.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Boorstin, Daniel Joseph (1914-2004)
American historian and writer, Librarian of Congress (1975-1987).

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Bradlaugh, Charles (1833-1891)
Atheist writer and member of Parliament.

The atheist does not say, "There is no God," but he says, "I know not what you mean by God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation."
Atheism/Agnosticism • God

Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.
Liberty/Freedom

Will any one, save the most bigoted, contend, that it is not certain gain to humanity to spread unbelief in the terrible doctrine that eternal torment is the probable fate of the great majority of the human family?
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith

Branden, Nathaniel (b. 1930)
Canadian psychotherapist and author of psychology books and multiple articles on ethical and political philosophy. Famous for his work on the psychology of self-esteem.

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.
Religion/Faith

If, in any culture, children are taught, "We are all equally unworthy in the sight of God." If, in any culture, children are taught, "You are born in sin and are sinful by nature." If children are given a message that amounts to "Don't think, don't question - believe!" If children are given a message that amounts to "Who are you to place your mind above that of the priest?" If children are told, "Submission to what you cannot understand is the beginning of morality." If children are informed, "In any clash between your judgement and that of your religious authorities, it is your authorities you must believe." If children are informed, "Self-sacrifice is the foremost virtue and the noblest duty." - then consider what will be the likely consequences for the practice of living consciously, or the practice of self-assertiveness, or any of the other pillars of healthy self-esteem.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Bukowski, Charles (1920-1994)
American poet and novelist.

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.
Freethought • God • Secular Humanism

Burbank, Luther (1849-1926)
American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science.

I have learned from Nature that dependence on unnatural beliefs weakens us in the struggle and shortens our breath for the race.
Nature • Reason/Rationality

The idea that a good God would send people to a burning Hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me.
God

Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature... Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an afterworld. Never was a child made more noble and good by the fear of a hell.
Ethics • Freethought • Nature • Religion/Faith

As a scientist I cannot help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. As for their prophets, there are as many today as ever before, only now science refuses to let them overstep the bounds of common sense.
Religion/Faith • Science

Burroughs, John (1837-1921)
American naturalist and writer.

Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
God

Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.
God • Science

Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.
Science

Under the old dispensation, before the advent of science, when this little world was all, and the sun, moon, and stars were merely fixtures overhead to give light and warmth, the conception of a being adequate to create and control it all was easier. The storms were expressive of his displeasure, the heavens were his throne, and the earth was his footstool. But in the light of modern astronomy one finds himself looking in vain for the God of his fathers, the magnified man who ruled the ancient world. In his place we have an infinite and eternal power whose expression is the visible universe, and to whom man is no more and no less than any other creature.
God • Nature • Science

I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.
God • Nature • Science

Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it.
Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

Celsus (c. 2 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.

Christians [Religionists], it is needless to say, utterly detest each other. They slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense, and makes perfect little pigs of those it wins over to its side.
Religion/Faith

Channing, William (1810-1884)
American writer and philosopher.

It is an important truth that the ultimate reliance of a human being must be on his own mind.
Reason/Rationality

Cioran, Emil M. (1911-1995)
Romanian-born French philosopher.

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Clarke, Arthur C. (b. 1917)
British science fiction writer.

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
God

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?
Religion/Faith

One of the greatest tragedies in human history was the hijacking of morality by religion.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

They [Religionists] know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
Science

We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.
Evolution

Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.
Freethought • Religion/Faith

Clifford, William Kingdon (1845-1879)
English mathematician and philosopher.

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.
Religion/Faith

The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
Religion/Faith

Cohen, Chapman (1868-1954)
British Freethought advocate and writer.

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
God

Regularity in Nature is not proof of the control of Nature by a divine intelligence; it is rather the reverse. If something - call it matter, or ether, or x - exists, it must operate in accordance with its innate qualities; and so long as this x remains uncontrolled, its manifestations will continue unchallenged - in other words, there will be "order". The same causes, the same results. That is the manifest signs of a natural "order" that knows nothing of God.
God • Nature

The belief in God may continue awhile in virtue of the lack of intelligence of some, of the carelessness of others, and of the conservative character of the mass. But no amount of apologizing can make up for the absence of genuine knowledge, nor can the flow of the finest eloquence do aught but clothe in regal raiment the body of a corpse.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God

The defenders of godism are now shrieking against the growing number of Atheists, and there is a call to the religious world to enter upon a crusade against Atheism. The stage in which heresy meant little more than all exchange of one god for another has passed. It has become a case of acceptance or rejection of the idea of God, and the growth is with those who reject.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Religion/Faith

Comte, Auguste (1798-1857)
French philosopher.

All good intellects have repeated, since [Francis] Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.
Reason/Rationality • Science

Darrow, Clarence Seward (1857-1938)
American lawyer who made a name for himself fighting capital punishment as well as championing the underdog and so-called lost-cause defendants.

If there is a soul, what is it, and where did it come from, and where does it go? Can anyone who is guided by his reason possibly imagine a soul independent of a body, or the place of its residence, or the character of it, or anything concerning it? If man is justified in any belief or disbelief on any subject, he is warranted in the disbelief in a soul. Not one scrap of evidence exists to prove any such impossible thing.
Nature • Reason/Rationality

I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Freethought • Secular Humanism

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt!
Philosophy • Religion/Faith • Skepticism

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.
Atheism/Agnosticism

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.
God • Religion/Faith • Skepticism

Darwin, Charles (1809-1882)
English naturalist, founder of the revolutionary theory of evolution and the principle of common descent through natural selection.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Evolution

Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
Ethics • Science • Secular Humanism

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith • Science

It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science.
Freethought • Religion/Faith • Science

It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.
Religion/Faith

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
Science • Skepticism

Dawkins, Richard (b. 1941)
East African-born British Zoologist; the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Religion/Faith

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring, we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after he was born.
God • Religion/Faith

Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.
Religion/Faith

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

The Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe...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.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die - on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Most people have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
Evolution

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Religion/Faith

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Evolution

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they're never going to be born. The number of people that could be here in my place outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here - the number of events that had to happen in order for you or me to exist. We are privileged to be alive, and we should make the most of our time on this world.
Evolution • Nature • Secular Humanism

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.
Science

Religion is unusual among divisible labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might had to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
Religion/Faith

de Unamuno, Miguel (1864-1936)
Spanish writer and philosopher.

Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
Skepticism

Dennett, Daniel (b. 1942)
Prominent American philosopher and atheist activist. His research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight -- that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God

When we replace the traditional idea of God the creator with the idea of the process of natural selection doing the creating, the creation is as wonderful as it ever was. All that great design work had to be done. It just wasn't done by an individual, it was done by this huge process, distributed over billions of years.
Evolution • God

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection – ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein. Because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: The world of purposeless, meaningless matter-in-motion, on the one side, and the world of meaning, and purpose, and design on the other. He understood that what he was proposing was a truly revolutionary idea.
Evolution

But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its history.
Religion/Faith • Science

Descartes, René (1596-1650)
French philosopher and mathematician.

I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt.
Skepticism

Dewey, John (1859-1952)
Prominent American philosopher and educator.

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.
Ethics • Reason/Rationality

Diderot, Denis (1713-1784)
French philosopher and writer of L'Encyclopédie (1751-1772).

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Liberty/Freedom

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian.
Religion/Faith

To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Dillard, Annie (b. 1945)
American author. Pulitzer Prize winner (1975) for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
Priest: "No, not if you did not know."
Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
(from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (1821-1881)
Russian novelist.

For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it... For the sake of common worship, they've slain each other with the sword.
Religion/Faith

Druyan, Ann (b. 1949)
American author and media producer known for her involvement in many projects aiming to popularize and explain science.

I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know.
Religion/Faith • Science

People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say that's completely opposite of the truth.
Science

Eco, Umberto (b. 1932)
Italian novelist and philosopher.

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
Religion/Faith

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.
Reason/Rationality

When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us--and rightly--that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.
Religion/Faith

Edison, Thomas Alva (1847-1931)
Prolific American inventor, who patented more than a thousand inventions.

To those searching for truth -- not the truth of dogma and darkness but the truth brought by reason, search, examination, and inquiry, discipline is required. For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction -- faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.
Reason/Rationality • Science

The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them.
Religion/Faith

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.
God • Religion/Faith

Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
Religion/Faith

Einstein, Albert (1879-1955)
German-born American theoretical physicist whose special and general theories of relativity revolutionized modern thought on the nature of space and time.

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
Nature • Science

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.
Ethics • Freethought • Secular Humanism

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
God • Nature

If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?
God • Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Evolution • Reason/Rationality • Science

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.
Ethics

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Nature • Science

I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.
God • Nature • Science

Ellis, Albert (b. 1913)
American psychologist and originator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
Religion/Faith

In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Some screwballs 100 years from now will manufacture atomic bombs in their bathtub and annihilate the human race because they demand that the world agree with their dogmas.
Religion/Faith

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
American essayist and poet.

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it.
Nature • Philosophy

Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
Ethics • Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.
Nature • Science

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
God

Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith • Skepticism

Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.

Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
God • Religion/Faith

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
God • Reason/Rationality

Ferrer, Francisco (1859-1909)
Spanish crusader against illiteracy, monarchy, militarism, and religion: in a sense the last major European figure executed for heresy, his death was celebrated by Pope Pius X.

When the masses become better informed about science, they will feel less need for help form supernatural Higher Powers. The need for religion will end when man becomes sensible enough to govern himself.
Freethought • Science

We will not, therefore, lose our time praying to an imaginary god for things which our own exertions alone can procure.
Freethought

Feuerbach, Ludwig von (1804-1872)
German philosopher.

Faith is essentially intolerant ... essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause.
Religion/Faith

Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

My purpose ... is is to transform theologians into anthropologists, lovers of God into lovers of man, candidates for the next world into students of this world ... I negate the fantastic hypocracy of theology and religion only in order to affirm the true nature of man.
Freethought • Science

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
Nature • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Feynman, Richard P. (1918-88)
American Caltech physicist and Nobel Laureate.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.
Philosophy • Skepticism

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
God • Religion/Faith • Science

By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.
Ethics

God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
God • Philosophy • Science

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
Liberty/Freedom

I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Skepticism

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Science

Fouts, Roger (b. 1943)
American professor of psychology, best known for his work teaching sign language to chimpanzees, which he documented in his book Next of Kin.

If you try to impose a rigid discipline while teaching a child or a chimp you are working against the boundless curiosity and need for relaxed play that make learning possible in the first place... learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design. Learning emerges spontaneously, it proceeds in an individualistic and unpredictable way, and it achieves its goal in its own good time. Once triggered, learning will not stop--unless it is hijacked by conditioning.
Liberty/Freedom • Nature • Religion/Faith

Creativity and learning are examples of innate behavior that can only be hindered, not helped, by rewards.
Nature • Philosophy

Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790)
American public official, writer, scientist.

The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
Religion/Faith

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Science

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939)
Austrian physician and pioneer psychoanalyst.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

The whole thing [Religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
Religion/Faith

The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.
God • Religion/Faith

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Science

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.
Religion/Faith

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviours by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively.
Ethics • Science • Secular Humanism

While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possesion of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded. If one attempts to assign religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
Religion/Faith

The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.
Reason/Rationality • Science

When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
Freethought • Religion/Faith

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
Religion/Faith

Gage, Matilda Joslyn (1826-1898)
American author and women's suffrage activist.

Do not allow the Church or State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.
Liberty/Freedom

The careful student of history will discover that religion has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.
Religion/Faith

Galilei, Galileo (1564-1642)
Italian astronomer and physicist.

I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.
Freethought • God

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Science

Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages.
Religion/Faith • Science

The hypothesis is pretty; its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable. Who does not see that this is purely arbitrary fiction that puts nothingness as existing and proposes nothing more than simple noncontradiction?
God • Religion/Faith

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.
Science

To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith • Science

It vexes me when they [The Catholic Church] would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.
Religion/Faith • Science

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith • Science

Gardner, Helen H.
American author, freethinker and advocate of women's equality.

The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality

It is always a surprise to me that women will sit, year after year, and be told that, because of a story as silly and childish as it is unjust, she is responsible for all the ills of life; that because, forsooth, some thousands of years ago a woman was so horribly wicked as to eat an apple she must and should occupy a humble and penitent position, and remain forever subject to the dictates of ecclesiastical pretenders. It is so silly, so childish, that for people of sense to accept it seems almost incredible.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

A religion that teaches a mother that she can be happy in heaven, with her children in hell -- in everlasting torment -- strikes at the very roots of family affection. It makes the human heart a stone. Love that means no more than that, is not love at all. No heart that has ever loved can see the object of its affection in pain and itself be happy. The thing is impossible. Any religion that can make that possible is more to be dreaded than war or famine or pestilence or death. It would eat out all that is great and beautiful and good in this life. It would make life a mockery and love a curse.
Freethought • Religion/Faith • Secular Humanism

Gautama, Siddhartha (B.C. 563-483)
AKA Gautama Buddha. Philosopher and spiritual teacher from ancient India and the historical founder of Buddhism.

Believe nothing on the faith of traditions, even though they have been held in honor for many generations and in many places. Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it. Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past. Do not believe what you yourself have imagined, persuading yourself that a God inspires you. Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests. After examination, believe what you yourself have tested and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.
Freethought • God • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860-1935)
Prominent American non-fiction writer, short story writer, novelist, commercial artist, lecturer, and social reformer.

The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.
Freethought • Religion/Faith • Science

One and all, religions have their original prophets, their sacred books, their traditions of ages gone. One and all require us to accept without question what other people long dead have said or written; to obey without question the commands of those behind us... No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, "This is our best thought, go on, think farther!" then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.
Religion/Faith

The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gave us religions which could not possibly be maintained without belief and obedience... We find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to square their beliefs with the laws of life.
Religion/Faith

Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants?
God

Goldman, Emma (1869-1940)
Russian-American anarchist, writer, publisher.

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Philosophy

Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental ability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress.
Religion/Faith

Atheism ... in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Religion/Faith

Gould, Stephen Jay (b. 1941)
American paleontologist.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a higher answer -- but none exists.
Evolution • Nature

The fundamentalists, by knowing the answers before they start [examining evolution], and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science -- or of any honest intellectual inquiry.
Evolution • Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency--the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
Reason/Rationality • Skepticism

Green, Ruth Hurmence (1915-1981)
"Born-Again Atheist".

Let us use our energy and our initiative to solve our problems without relying on prayers and wishful thinking. When we have faith in ourselves, we will find we do not have to have faith in gods.
Freethought

Haeckel, Ernst (1834-1919)
Eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist.

Convinced that there is no eternal life awaiting him, he [man] will strive all the more to brighten his life on earth and rationally improve his condition in harmony with that of his fellows.
Freethought • Secular Humanism

Our science of evolution won its greatest triumph when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, its most powerful opponents, the Churches, became reconciled to it, and endeavored to bring their dogmas into line with it.
Evolution • Religion/Faith

The Monistic religion of Nature, which, accordingly, we must consider as the true "religion of the Future," will not, like all Church religions, stand opposed to the rational knowledge of nature, but in perfect harmony with it. And whereas Church religions are founded on deception and superstition, the religion of Nature will be based upon truth and knowledge.
Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

Haldane, J.B.S. (1892-1964)
British geneticist, evolutionary biologist and one of the founders of population genetics.

Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith • Science

Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel (1889-1951)
American socialist reformer and publisher.

The influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism - the two forces, fundamentally skeptical, that we have seen continuously at work in human progress - have accomplished the very things for which religion claims the credit.
Liberty/Freedom • Science • Skepticism

The fear of gods and devils is never anything but a pitiable degradation of the human mind.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Theism tells men that they are the slaves of a God. Atheism assures men that they are the investigators and users of nature.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith

Religion, throughout the greater part of its history, has been a form of "holy" terrorism. It still aims its terrors at men, but modern realism and the spread of popular enlightenment has progressively robbed those terrors of their old-fashioned effectiveness. Wherever men take religion very seriously -- wherever there is devout belief -- there is also the inseparable feeling of fear.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

The fact that millions of people still believe in a hell of eternal punishment for sinners and unbelievers is a drastic reminder of the need for persistent, progressive education of the masses. We have as yet only begun to realize the possibilities of progress. But science, rationalism and humanism have pointed the way, they have taken the first great steps, and we must keep right ahead on the highway of modernism.
Reason/Rationality • Science • Secular Humanism

For centuries men have fought in the most unusual and devious ways to prove the existence of a God. But evidently a God, if there were a God, has been hiding out. He has never been discovered or proved. One would think a God, if any, should have revealed himself unmistakably. Isn't this non-appearance of a God (the non-appearance of a God in the shape of a single bit of evidence for his existence) a pretty, strong, sufficient proof of non-existence?
God

With its fears and superstitions and prejudices, religion poisons the mind of any one who believes in it -- and even the best man, under the influence of religion, cannot reason wholesomely. Atheism, on the contrary, opens the mind to the clean winds of truth and establishes a fresh-air sanity.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith

Harris, Sam (b. 1967)
American author with active interests in philosophy, religion and neuroscience. His first book "The End of Faith" won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award.

Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse.
Religion/Faith

Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago.
Religion/Faith

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention — distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence — is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory.
Religion/Faith

Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity — a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically subdued, converted, or put to sword.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

The penalty for apostasy [in Islam] is death. We would do well to linger over this fact for a moment, because it is the black pearl of intolerance that no liberal exegesis will ever fully digest.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

The history of Christianity is principally a story of mankind's misery and ignorance rather than of its requited love of God.
Religion/Faith

Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.
Religion/Faith

Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths.
Religion/Faith

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.
Religion/Faith

It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.
Religion/Faith • Science

120 million of us [Americans] place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
Religion/Faith

Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society.
Ethics • Religion/Faith • Science

(On stem-cell research): The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
Ethics • Religion/Faith • Science

To believe that God exists is to believe that I stand in some relation to his existence such that his existence is itself the reason for my belief.
God • Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
Religion/Faith

Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.
Religion/Faith

We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.
Religion/Faith

How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.
Religion/Faith

A close study of these "holy" books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Fundamentalist Christians support Israel because they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy Land — specifically, the rebuilding of Solomon's temple — will usher in both the Second Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews.
Religion/Faith

The Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions — jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate.
God

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago — and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since — is no one to consult on questions of ethics.
Ethics • God

The God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
Evolution • God • Nature

Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.
Religion/Faith

Faith is, really, the permission that religious people give one another to believe things strongly when reasons fail.
Religion/Faith

Given the astounding number of galaxies and potential worlds arrayed overhead, the complexities of life on earth and the advances in our ethical discourse over the last 2,000 years, the world's religions offer a view of reality that is now so utterly impoverished as to scarcely constitute a view of reality at all.
Religion/Faith

Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance.
Religion/Faith

Hawking, Stephen William (b. 1942)
British scientist, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge (a post once held by Isaac Newton).

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
God • Philosophy • Science

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Religion/Faith • Science

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life.
Philosophy • Science

Hayes, Judith
American author, famous for her long-running Happy Heretic column.

If judged only by the results that challenge the laws of probabilities, then the power of prayer is nil.
Nature • Religion/Faith

If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
Evolution

The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?
Religion/Faith

These highly exalted "linchpins," particularly in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, are nothing more than a carrot-and-stick approach to "morality." Do good or else! Goodness is not promoted for its own sake. It is promoted as a means of avoiding God's wrath and damnation. This is the antithesis of morality. You're doing something good solely because you're afraid of what might happen to you (frying in hell) if you don't. You're looking out for Number One --- pure selfishness --- the opposite of truly moral behavior. By contrast, those of us who don't believe there are any gods or devils snapping at our heels, do good simply because we feel compassion, and want to help. Surely this is truly moral behavior. We are seeking no spiritual rewards or brownie points for the hereafter. We just want to help.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Ethics • Religion/Faith

Life can be beautiful, profound, and awe-inspiring, even without an irate god threatening us with eternal torment -- or god's self-appointed spokespersons imposing their various notions of proper god-subservient behaviors on everyone else.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Religion/Faith

Heinlein, Robert A. (1907-1988)
Influential American science fiction author.

One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
Ethics

The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H. Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.
God • Religion/Faith

History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
Religion/Faith

A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason - but one cannot have both.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.
Religion/Faith

Hitchens, Christopher (b. 1949)
British journalist, author, critic and self-proclaimed political satirist.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
Reason/Rationality

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!
God • Religion/Faith

Along with Islam and Christianity, [Judaism] does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensible condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
Religion/Faith

Hoffer, Eric (1902-1983)
American philosopher.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
Religion/Faith

The aim of a religious movement is to inflict a malady in society, then offer the religion as a cure.
Religion/Faith

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
Religion/Faith

Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.
Religion/Faith

The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse. It is doubtful whether a movement which does not profess some preposterous and patently irrational dogma can be possessed of that zealous drive which "must either win men or destroy the world." It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice - that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt - are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.
Religion/Faith

Hubbard, Elbert (1856-1915)
American writer and publisher.

Theology, by diverting the attention of men from this life to another, and by endeavoring to coerce all men into one religion, constantly preaching that this world is full of misery, but the next world would be beautiful -- or not, as the case may be -- has forced on men the thought of fear where otherwise there might have been the happy abandon of nature.
Religion/Faith

Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific -- that is, truthful -- must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.
Religion/Faith

Hugo, Victor (1802-1885)
French poet, dramatist, novelist.

There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster -- and an extinguisher: the parson.
Religion/Faith • Science

Hume, David (1711-1776)
Scottish philosopher and historian, one of the most important figures in the Scottish Enlightenment.

But I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.
Nature • Philosophy

All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be skeptical, or at least cautious; and not to admit of any hypothesis, whatsoever; much less, of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.
Skepticism

There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves
Reason/Rationality • Skepticism

Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895)
British biologist, stront supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, coined the term 'agnostism'.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best -- that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Reason/Rationality • Science

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
Nature • Reason/Rationality

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.
Freethought • Religion/Faith

Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.
Liberty/Freedom

Cherish [Science], venerate her, follow her methods faithfully ... and the future of this people will be greater than the past.
Science

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
Reason/Rationality • Science

No one who has lived in the world as long as you and I have, can entertain the pious delusion that it is engineered upon principles of benevolence... the cosmos remains always beautiful and profoundly interesting in every corner--and if I had as many lives as a cat I would leave no corner unexplored.
Reason/Rationality • Science

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894-1963)
British writer and philosopher, one of the leading figures of modern thought.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Religion/Faith

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887-1975)
British biologist and author, known for his popularizations of science in books and lectures.

God, in any but a purely philosophical, and one is almost tempted to say Pickwickian sense, turns out to be a product of the human mind. As an independent or unitary being active in the affairs of the universe, he does not exist.
God

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
God

Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Ethics • God

Ingersoll, Robert Green (1833-1899)
American lawyer and lecturer known for his adamant support of scientific and humanistic rationalism.

Is there an intelligent man or woman now in the world who believes in the Garden of Eden story? If you find any man who believes it, strike his forehead and you will hear an echo. Something is for rent.
Freethought • Reason/Rationality

The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?
Religion/Faith • Science

An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment.
God • Liberty/Freedom

The notion that faith in God is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 'faith.'
God • Religion/Faith

The mechanic, when a wheel refuses to turn, never thinks of dropping on his knees and asking the assistance of some divine power. He knows there is a reason. He knows that something is too large or too small; that there is something wrong with his machine; and he goes to work and he makes it larger or smaller, here or there, until the wheel will turn.
Reason/Rationality

Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers; it is the only prayer that deserves an answer -- good, honest, noble work.
Ethics • Science

I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Secular Humanism

As long as every question is answered by the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply impossible.
God • Religion/Faith

As people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.
Reason/Rationality • Science

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.
Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Science

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous -- if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Fear believes -- courage doubts. Fear falls up the earth and prays -- courage stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism -- courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, devils and ghosts. Fear is religion, courage is science.
Freethought • Religion/Faith • Science

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings. Environment is a sculptor -- a painter. If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

God did not reward men for being honest, generous and brave, but for the act of faith. Without faith, all the so-called virtues were sins. And the men who practiced these virtues, without faith, deserved to suffer eternal pain. All of these comforting and reasonable things were taught by the ministers in their pulpits -- by teachers in Sunday schools and by parents at home. The children were victims. They were assaulted in the cradle -- in their mother's arms. Then, the schoolmaster carried on the war against their natural sense, and all the books they read were filled with the same impossible truths. The poor children were helpless. The atmosphere they breathed was filled with lies -- lies that mingled with their blood.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

We are not endeavoring to chain the future but to free the present ... We are the advocates of inquiry, investigation, and thought ... It is grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed ... I look for the day when reason, throned upon the world's brains, shall be the King of Kings and the God of Gods.
Freethought • Reason/Rationality

To hate man and worship god seems to be the sum of all the creeds.
Religion/Faith

Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Liberty/Freedom

The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.
Freethought • Science

Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.
Religion/Faith

This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Freethought • Religion/Faith

Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own. All these gods demanded praise, flattery, and worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume. All these gods have insisted upon having a vast number of priests, and the priests have always insisted upon being supported by the people, and the principal business of these priests has been to boast about their god, and to insist that he could easily vanquish all the other gods put together.
God • Religion/Faith

As long as man believes the Bible [or any other Holy Book] to be infallible, that book is his master. The civilization of this century is not the child of faith, but of unbelief -- the result of free thought.
Freethought • Religion/Faith

Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Science

Man must learn to rely upon himself. Reading bibles will not protect him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires and clothing will. To prevent famine, one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the world.
Religion/Faith • Science

For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said, "Think!" The many have said, "Believe!"
Religion/Faith • Science

Reason, Observation and Experience -- the Holy Trinity of Science -- have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.
Ethics • Reason/Rationality • Science

When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned.
Religion/Faith

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
God

A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.
Freethought

The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few and the damnation of almost everybody.
Religion/Faith • Science

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.
God • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.
Liberty/Freedom

A man is not moral because he is obedient through fear or ignorance. Morality lives in the realm of perceived obligation.
Ethics

When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free -- free to think, to express my thoughts -- free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination's wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself... I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Freethought • Reason/Rationality

I want no heaven for which I must give my reason; no happiness in exchange for my liberty, and no immortality that demands the surrender of my individuality. Better rot in the windowless tomb, to which there is no door but the red mouth of the pallid worm, than to wear the jeweled collar of a god.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith

Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)
The third President of the United States (1801-1809), author, scientist, architect, educator, and diplomat, deist, avid separationist.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must approve the homage of reason rather than of blind-folded fear. Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences.
God • Reason/Rationality

On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise ... without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.
God • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies.
Religion/Faith

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Liberty/Freedom • Secular Humanism

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)
German philosopher, considered by many the most influential thinker of modern times.

He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray.
Ethics • Freethought

The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend -- and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective.
God • Reason/Rationality

Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.
Religion/Faith

King, Stephen (b. 1947)
American author.

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.
God • Religion/Faith

Kurtz, Paul (b. 1925)
American Humanist leader.

Human life has no meaning independent of itself. There is no cosmic force or deity to give it meaning or significance. There is no ultimate destiny for man. Such a belief is an illusion of humankind's infancy. The meaning of life is what we choose to give it. Meaning grows out of human purposes alone. Nature provides us with an infinite range of opportunities, but it is only our vision and our action that select and realize those that we desire... Thus the good life is achieved, invented, fashioned in an active life of enterprise and endeavor. But whether or not an individual chooses to enter into the arena depends upon him alone. Those who do can find it energizing, exhilarating, full of triumph and satisfaction. In spite of failures, setbacks, suffering, and pain, life can be fun.
Secular Humanism

The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.
Skepticism

The beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is insufficient evidence that a god or gods have created us and the recognition that we are responsible in part for our own destiny. Human beings can achieve this good life, but it is by the cultivation of the virtues of intelligence and courage, not faith and obedience, that we will most likely be able to do so.
God • Philosophy • Secular Humanism

Lewis, Joseph (1889-1968)
American philanthropist, publisher, atheist, founder of Freethought Press Association.

Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter closed?
God • Science • Skepticism

Facts and not merely opinions are what we want. Emotionalism is not a substitute for the truth.
Reason/Rationality • Science

When the tyranny of the state is combined with the hypocrisy of the church, you have a modern example of the twin vultures that have devoured man, and his rights, throughout the ages.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

A precept claiming infallibility should certainly possess the universality of the law of gravitation and the perfection of the arithmetical table. If it fails to possess these undeviating qualities, its imperfection is self-evident and its value either greatly diminished or useless.
Science

Man's inhumanity to man will continue as long as man loves God more than he loves his fellow man.
Ethics • God

Locke, John (1632-1704)
English philosopher considered the first of the British Empiricists. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers and contributors to liberal theory.

So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men most often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.
Religion/Faith

Faith is the assent to any proposition not made out by the deduction of reason but upon the credit of the proposer.
Religion/Faith

The Church which teaches men not to keep faith with heretics has no claim to toleration.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, it is a matter of faith, and above reason.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Lord Byron (1788-1824)
British poet acclaimed as one of the leading figures of the romantic movement.

A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?
Ethics • Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Lucretius (B.C. 94?-55?)
Roman poet who turned the philosophy of Epicurus into a great philosophical poem, De Return Natura (On the Nature of Things); he sought to free humanity from the fear of death and of the gods, which he considered the main cause of human unhappiness.

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
Religion/Faith

Poor humanity, to saddle the gods with such a responsibility and throw in a vindictive temper. What griefs they hatch for themselves, what festering sores for us, what tears for our prosperity! This is not piety, this oft-repeated show of bowing a veiled head before a graven image; this bustling to every altar; this kow-towing and prostration on the ground with palms outspread before the shrines of the gods; this deluging of vow on vow. True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.
God • Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Macaulay, Thomas (1800-1859)
English writer and politician.

The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.
Religion/Faith

Madison, James (1751-1836)
The fourth President of the United States (1809-1817).

What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient allies.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
Religion/Faith

Martin, Emma (1812-1851)
Early British Freethought Pamphleteer.

Religion, with an upward glancing eye, asks what there is above. Philosophy looks around her and seeks to make a happy home of earth. Religion asks what God would have her do: -- Philosophy, what nature's laws advise. Religion has never given us laws in which cruelty and vice may not be seen, but philosophy's pure moral code may be thus briefly stated: -- "Happiness is the great object of human existence..."
Ethics • God • Nature • Philosophy • Religion/Faith

The person much inclined to ask God's assistance, learns to repose on the hope of its obtainment, instead of actively seeking the good desired by his own labour.
Ethics • God • Religion/Faith

Martin, Michael (b. 1932)
Professor of Philosophy, Boston University.

Religious experiences in one culture often conflict with those in another. One cannot accept all of them as veridical, yet there does not seem to be any way to separate the veridical experiences from the rest.
Religion/Faith

Religious experiences are like those induced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and sleep deprivation: They tell no uniform or coherent story, and there is no plausible theory to account for discrepancies among them.
Religion/Faith

Marx, Karl (1818-1883)
German political philosopher and economist.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Religion/Faith

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Freethought • Religion/Faith

McCabe, Joseph (1867-1955)
Former Roman Catholic priest and scholar who renounced his faith and later wrote nearly 250 atheistic and antireligious books.

Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.
Ethics • Evolution

A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts -- a "bundle of facts." Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the "law" because they act in that way.
Nature • Science

The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances.
Nature • Science

Theism is doomed in all ages. The advance of civilization to its heights has brought about an increasing disbelief in all religion. Now that, for the first time in history, we are universalizing culture, the prospect is clear. No refinement of the idea of God can save it from disappearance.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Religion/Faith • Science

Today we know not only that there is a terrible amount of disorder in the heavens -- great catastrophes or conflagrations occur frequently -- but evolution gives us a perfectly natural explanation of such order as there is. No distinguished astronomer now traces "the finger of God" in the heavens; and astronomers ought to know best.
Evolution • Nature • Science

The making of an atheist implies a mental stimulation and training which brings into play the primary factors of social progress.
Atheism/Agnosticism

McCarthy, John (b. 1927)
Prominent American computer scientist famous for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence, which he coined the term for in 1955.

An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God

It is deplorable that many people think that the best way to improve the world is to forbid something. However, they're morally more advanced than the people who think the best way to improve the world is to kill somebody.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

You say you couldn't live if you thought the world had no purpose. You're saying that you can't form purposes of your own — that you need someone to tell you what to do. The average child has more gumption than that.
Religion/Faith

McGinn, Colin (b. 1950)
British Philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of mind.

Nobody can have their beliefs protected from rational criticism. I think there's got to be a very firm distinction between criticism and persecution. And I think people misunderstand the idea of tolerance often. They think that tolerance is the same thing as lack of criticism. But to me, tolerating somebody else's beliefs is not failing to criticize them. It's not persecuting them for having those beliefs. That is absolutely important. You should not persecute people for their beliefs. It doesn't mean you can't criticize their beliefs. Those are not the same thing. I think people have tended to sort of run these two things together, and they perceive criticism as if it was persecution. But it isn't.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

One of the things about God is everything you as a moral being do is under the scrutiny of this being who's going to reward you or not as the case may be. I think it compromises people's moral sense, because they feel as if everything they do which is good, they're doing it because God will approve of them and reward them for it. And once you jettison that idea, you do what you should, because you should, because it's the right thing to do and that you don't feel that there's always some sense of self-interest involved in any moral action that you perform.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Ethics • God

I think it's an oppressive idea that God is always looking into your soul at every moment of the day and weighing you up. It makes people too introspective. So, I found it was sort of liberating to not have that oppressive, Big Brother surveillance from God all the time. And I found the universe more interesting and more stimulating without gods. Investigating the universe without a religious impulse or religious perspective on it was to me a more interesting and stimulating thing to do.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Nature

Medawar, Sir Peter Brian (1915-1987)
Brazilian-born British immunologist, Nobel Laureate in medicine (1960).

It is naive to suppose that the acceptance of evolution theory depends upon the evidence of a number of so-called "proofs"; it depends rather upon the fact that the evolutionary theory permeates and supports every branch of biological science, much as the notion of the roundness of the earth underlies all geodesy and all cosmological theories on which the shape of the earth has a bearing. Thus antievolutionism is of the same stature as flat-earthism.
Evolution

To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it -- and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

Mencken, Henry Louis (1880-1956)
American editor and critic.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.
Ethics • Skepticism

The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum -- the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once -- and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
Reason/Rationality • Science

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
Philosophy • Skepticism

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
God

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.
Evolution

What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.
Religion/Faith

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable... A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.
Religion/Faith

The cosmos is a gigantic fly wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
Nature • Religion/Faith

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.
Religion/Faith

Meredith, George (1828-1909)
English novelist and poet.

The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873)
British philosopher-economist, who had a great impact on 19th-century British thought, not only in philosophy and economics but also in political science, logic, and ethics.

It is historically true that a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of distinguished integrity and honor.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Ethics • Freethought

Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

The world would be astonished if it new how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.
Ethics • Philosophy • Skepticism

What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindeness, personal dignity, even the sense of honor, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.
Ethics • Religion/Faith • Secular Humanism

Myers, Paul Zachary "PZ" (b. 1957)
American biology professor and the author of the science blog Pharyngula. Public critic of intelligent design and the creationist movement.

What I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It's a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It's not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don't elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works.
Evolution • Religion/Faith

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
Freethought • God • Science • Skepticism

Nasrin, Taslima (b. 1962)
Bangladeshi writer, secular humanist, feminist; now living under fatwa (Islamic death sentence).

Religion, society and state -- from none of these do women get their proper honor. It is religion, which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or another fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say that because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn't permit democracy and it violates human rights.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

I don't agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam... To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Nehru, Jawaharlal (1889-1964)
Political leader of the Indian National Congress and pivotal figure during the Indian independence movement. Served as the first Prime Minister of the Republic of India. Also a writer, scholar and amateur historian.

I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized on this earth, capable of becoming master of his fate and captain of his soul.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening of custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving poor... Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid... The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.
Science

No country or people who are slaves to dogma and the dogmatic mentality can progress.
Religion/Faith

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900)
German philosopher.

One kind of honesty has been unknown to all founders of religions and their likes -- they have never made of their experiences a matter of conscience and knowledge. "What did I really experience? What happened in me and around me then? Was my mind sufficiently alert? Was my will bent against fantasy?" -- none of them has asked such questions, none of our dear religious people asks such questions even now: they feel, rather, a thirst for things which are contrary to reason and do not put too many difficulties in the way of satisfying it -- thus they experience "miracles" and "rebirths" and hear the voices of angels!
Religion/Faith

"Sins" are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be "sinning."
Ethics • Religion/Faith

So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is truth?
Religion/Faith

All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race – before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its God to be truthful and understandable in his communications.
Religion/Faith

O'Casey, Sean (1880-1964)
Irish dramatist whose plays portray the Irish struggle for independence.

What time has been wasted during man's destiny in the struggle to decide what man's next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

O'Hair, Madalyn Murray (1919-1995)
Atheist activist.

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.
Atheism/Agnosticism

An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Secular Humanism

But people ... don't even know what atheism is. It's not a negation of anything. You don't have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. I'm thrilled to feel that I can rely on myself totally and absolutely; that my children are being brought up so that when they meet a problem they can't cop out by foisting it off on God. Madalyn Murray's going to solve her own problems, and nobody's going to intervene. It's about time the world got up off its knees and looked at itself in the mirror and said: "Well, we are men. Let's start acting like it."
Atheism/Agnosticism • Freethought

Orwell, George (1903-1950)
AKA Eric Arthur Blair. British writer.

One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.
Reason/Rationality

Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)
Anglo-American political philosopher, whose writings influenced the American Revolution (1775-1783), the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the freethought movements ever since.

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system.
Religion/Faith

When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.
Religion/Faith

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Freethought • Reason/Rationality • Secular Humanism

To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
Religion/Faith

Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
Ethics • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Muslim Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
Freethought • Reason/Rationality

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Religion/Faith

When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.
Religion/Faith

Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662)
French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)
American writer.

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter ... than you and I; and all religion ... is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
Religion/Faith

The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Porco, Carolyn
American Planetary Scientist. Leader of the Cassini Science Imaging Team and a lead imaging scientist on the New Horizons Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission.

Let's teach our children about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is so much more glorious and awesome and even comforting than anything offered by any scripture or God-concept that I know of.
God • Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

I know that I derive the same kind of spiritual fulfillment [that religious people derive from religion] from what I do, being a planetary scientist, seeing our exploration of the solar system come to fruition. I get such a spiritual high from it that I don't even see the need for religion. People gravitate to religion to feel a connection to the underlying meaning of everything. Well, as a scientist you're always looking for the underlying meaning, and that to me is such a spiritual life, I wish people would open themselves up to that wonder.
Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

Rand, Ayn (1905-1982)
American novelist and philosopher.

If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking... The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
Ethics • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality

Randi, James (b. 1928)
Illusionist who exposes the parlor magic techniques of faith healers and others.

Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work.
Science

Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence -- and that confidence can be modified and/or reversed by further observations and experimentation. Science approaches truth, closer and closer, by hard dedicated work. Religion already has it all decided, and it's "in the book." It's dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by reality and whatever facts we come upon in the real world.
Religion/Faith • Science

Renan, Ernest (1823-1892)
French historian.

No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Roberts, Stephen
Atheistic activist.

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God

Roddenberry, Gene (1921-1991)
Science fiction author, creator of Star Trek.

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.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

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.
God • Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

Rose, Ernestine (1810-1892)
American feminist, abolitionist, freethinker, and atheist. One of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America.

It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.
Atheism/Agnosticism

Rushdie, Salman (b. 1947)
British-Indian essayist and author of fiction, most of which is set on the Indian subcontinent. Famous for his novel The Satanic Verses, which provoked violent criticism in the Muslim community.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
Religion/Faith • Skepticism

When there is conflict between the liberty of speech and the beliefs of private individuals, the liberty of speech must always take precedence. Because otherwise every other liberty, including freedom of religious observance, is put into question.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Skepticism

Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872-1970)
AKA Third Earl Russell. British philosopher, mathematician, social critic, writer.

If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called 'education.'
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.
Ethics • Freethought

The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology.
Science

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Philosophy

Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favor of systematic hatred.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Religion/Faith

The whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men... We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.
Ethics • God • Liberty/Freedom • Philosophy

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor all their own.
Science

My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
Ethics • Philosophy • Secular Humanism

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Philosophy • Science

What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.
Freethought

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dares not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
Freethought • Philosophy • Religion/Faith

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the word uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Science

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Ethics • Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Sagan, Carl Edward (1934-1996)
American astronomer, astrobiologist and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics, and other natural sciences.

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with it's skeptical protocols is the pathway to a dark age.
Science

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith • Science

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
Science

If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote... Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.
Science

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.
Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Science

You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Eratosthenes's only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest for experiment. With those tools he correctly deduced the circumference of the Earth, to high precision, with an error of only a few percent. That's pretty good figuring for 2200 years ago.
Science

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.
Science

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.
Nature • Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Secular Humanism

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Reason/Rationality • Science

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, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
Atheism/Agnosticism

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
Reason/Rationality • Science

Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of the astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
Nature • Religion/Faith

Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.
Religion/Faith • Science

Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. The fact that religions can be so shamelessly dishonest, so contemptuous of the intelligence of their adherents, and still flourish does not speak very well for the tough-mindedness of the believers. But it does indicate, if a demonstration was needed, that near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.
Religion/Faith

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes — an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
Science

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith • Science

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.
Religion/Faith • Science

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
Nature • Science

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

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?
Religion/Faith • Science

Sakharov, Andrei (1921-1989)
Russian nuclear physicist and human rights activist.

Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of peoples by the mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom

Santayana, George (1863-1952)
Spanish-born U.S.-raised philosopher and poet.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
Religion/Faith

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously -- these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
God • Religion/Faith

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Nature

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Secular Humanism

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Religion/Faith • Science

Semple, Etta (1855-1914)
Freethought publisher of The Freethought Ideal.

Every true Freethinker accords to each individual the right to mental freedom. Where this freedom leads is no concern of others so long as it encroaches not upon their rights.
Ethics • Freethought • Liberty/Freedom

If I deny the existence of a God -- if I deny the idea of a gold paved city with pearly walls and jasper gates somewhere out of knowledge and space and prefer to die and to trust the unfaltering laws of nature -- if, in plain words I don't want to go to heaven, whose business is it but my own?
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom

If those who oppose Freethought did not strive to force all to think as they do, accept Christ by faith, believe the bible to be infallible, keep Sunday as a holy day, and work for a future reward, then our fight would be at an end instantly. Liberty of Conscience is all we ask -- not control of any class, creed, or sect.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Seneca the Younger (3 B.C. - 65 A.D.)
Greek philosopher.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Religion/Faith

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
English playwright and poet whose body of works is considered the greatest in English literature.

In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
(The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 2)
Religion/Faith

It is a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it.
(The Winter's Tale, Act 2, Scene 3)
Atheism/Agnosticism • Freethought

Modest doubt is call'd the beacon of the wise.
(Troilus and Cressida, Act 2, Scene 2)
Philosophy • Skepticism

Shapley, Harlow (1885-1972)
American Astronomer famous for taking part in the "Great Debate" on the nature of nebulae and galaxies and the size of the universe, correctly arguing against the theory that the Sun was at the center of the galaxy.

Theories crumble, but good observations never fade.
Science

Our studies of the universe show the uniformity of its chemical structure and generally of its physical laws. We are made of the same stuff as the stars, so when we study astronomy we are in a way only investigating our remote ancestry and our place in the universe of star stuff. Our very bodies consist of the same chemical elements found in the most distant nebulae, and our activities are guided by the same universal rules.
Evolution • Nature • Science

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950)
Irish-born British playwright and a founder of the Fabian Society.

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic 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.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

Education: A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.
Freethought • Science

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
Liberty/Freedom • Science

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
Liberty/Freedom • Philosophy • Secular Humanism

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
Ethics • Secular Humanism

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Freethought

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
British romantic poet.

If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction.
Freethought • God • Reason/Rationality

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
God • Philosophy

It is thus that the generality of mankind, whose lot is ignorance, attributes to the Divinity, not only the unusual effects which strike them, but moreover the most simple events, of which the causes are the most simple to understand by whomever is able to study them. In a word, man has always respected unknown causes, surprising effects that his ignorance kept him from unraveling. It was on this debris of nature that man raised the imaginary colossus of the Divinity.
God • Religion/Faith

It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests: authority, confidence, submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs: they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray: but why did their fathers fall on their knees?
God • Religion/Faith

In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interests of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced by the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.
God • Religion/Faith

Shermer, Michael (b. 1954)
American science writer, founder of The Skeptics Society and editor of its magazine Skeptic.

Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength.
Science

It is sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research, fine-tuning our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists remain mired in medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals in the belly of an Ark.
Evolution • Religion/Faith • Science

(On God as the "first cause"):
The first-cause and prime-mover argument is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or what caused and moved God?
God • Reason/Rationality

Smith, George H. (b. 1949)
American philosopher of atheism and libertarianism.

It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Freethought

When the atheist is told that God is unknowable, he may interpret this claim in one of two ways. He may suppose, first, that the theist has acquired knowledge of a being that, by his own admission, cannot possibly be known; or, second, he may assume that the theist simply does not know what he is talking about.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Science

The argument from design is ultimately an appeal to miraculous causes, i.e., causes that do not, and cannot, occur in the natural course of events. This is why an "explanation" via design is not a legitimate alternative to scientific and other naturalistic modes of explanation. To refer to a miraculous "cause" is to refer to something that is inherently unknowable, and this "sanctuary of ignorance" explains nothing at all. However much it may soothe the imagination of the ignorant, it does nothing to satisfy the understanding of a rational person.
Nature • Reason/Rationality • Science

A willingness to engage in the give and take of argument displays a commitment to cognitive egalitarianism -- the proposition that all people should be treated as intellectual equals, and that no individual can legitimately claim a privileged immunity from the burden of proof.
Reason/Rationality • Science

If acorns start growing into theologians, or if women begin turning into pillars of salt, then we may wish to hypothesize about a supernatural influence. But until such time as nature becomes hopelessly unintelligible and unpredictable, we need look no further than nature itself for explanations.
Nature • Reason/Rationality • Science

If God knows the future with infallible certainty, he cannot change it -- in which case he cannot be omnipotent. If God can change the future, however, he cannot have infallible knowledge of it prior to its actual happening -- in which case he cannot be omniscient.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Philosophy

Smoker, Barbara (b. 1923)
President, National Secular Society (1971-).

To imagine that "God moves in mysterious ways" is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.
Freethought • God

The one function that most gods seem to have in common is to give human existence some ultimate purpose -- and, while it is not possible to disprove an ultimate purpose, there does not seem to be any evidence for it. This is not to say, of course, that there is no purpose in life at all: we all make our own purposes as we go through life. And life does not lose its value simply because it it not going to last forever.
Freethought • God • Reason/Rationality • Secular Humanism

People who believe in a divine creator, trying to live their lives in obedience to his supposed wishes and in expectation of a supposed eternal reward, are victims of the greatest confidence trick of all time.
God • Religion/Faith

Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don't find them believable. As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don't claim to know anything with certainty -- it's the believers who know it all.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Freethought • Reason/Rationality

To imagine that God wants prayers and hymns of praise is to make him out to a sort of oriental potentate; while praying for favors is an attempt to get him to change his allegedly all-wise mind.
God • Religion/Faith

Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903)
British philosopher who attempted to apply the theory of evolution to philosophy and ethics in his series Synthetic Philosophy.

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.
Freethought • Philosophy • Secular Humanism

[Agnostics are] people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Philosophy

Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas, of those assumed cognitions which it could not substantiate.
Religion/Faith • Science

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.
Evolution • Philosophy

Spinoza, Baruch (1632-1677)
Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin. Considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, and one of Western philosophy's definitive ethicists.

Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Philosophy has no end in view, save truth. Faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.
Nature • Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815-1902)
American feminist and social reformer.

I can truly say that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed, and the gloom connected with everything associated with the name of religion.
Religion/Faith

Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals -- grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to an unknown god.
Religion/Faith

It is through the perversion of the religious element in woman, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life with all its high duties in abeyance to that which is to come, that she and the children she has trained have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

All through the centuries, scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.
Liberty/Freedom • Nature • Religion/Faith • Science

I can say that the happiest period of my life has been since I emerged from the shadows and superstitions of the old theologies, relieved from all gloomy apprehensions of the future, satisfied that as my labors and capacities were limited to this sphere of action, I was responsible for nothing beyond my horizon, as I could neither understand nor change the condition of the unknown world. Giving ourselves, then, no trouble about the future, let us make the most of the present, and fill up our lives with earnest work here.
Ethics • Freethought • Secular Humanism

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Embrace truth as it is revealed today by human reason.
Reason/Rationality • Science

When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brain of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of "thus saith the Lord."
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Steinbeck, John Ernst (1902-1968)
American novelist, Nobel Laureate in literature (1962).

This I believe:
That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
And this I would fight for:
The freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
And this I must fight against:
Any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
Freethought • Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Secular Humanism

Steinem, Gloria (b. 1934)
American feminist and journalist.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion, or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

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.
Religion/Faith

Stendhal (1783-1842)
AKA Marie-Henri Beyle. French writer, known for his accurate analysis of his characters' psychology.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
Religion/Faith

Stenger, Victor J. (b. 1935)
American professor of physics, astronomy and philosophy. Known for his work in particle physics and for being an outspoken critic and skeptic of Intelligent Design and other related pseudoscience.

Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere.
Science

When people start using science to argue for their specific beliefs and delusions, to try to claim that they're supported by science, then scientists at least have to speak up and say, "You're welcome to your delusions, but don't say that they're supported by science."
Religion/Faith • Science

Scientific evidence for God's existence is being claimed today by theists, many of whom carry respectable scientific or philosophical credentials. "He" who is neither a "she" nor an "it" supposedly answers prayers and otherwise dramatically affects the outcome of events. If these consequences are as significant as believers say, then the effects should be detectable in properly controlled experiments.
God • Science

People are entitled to their opinions, but when the opinion is in disagreement with the data -- with the facts -- when that opinion does not stand up under critical or rational scrutiny, I think we have a right to point that out. We shouldn't be stepping on anybody's toes when we do that. If they're going to be spouting off nonsense, then we should say that -- not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of scientific fact. When someone says science says something, and science doesn't say something ("It doesn't say that! That's a misrepresentation of what science says."), then I think we can state that. And if it ruffles some feathers, so what? I just don't see the basis for arguing that creationism has equal standing with evolution.
Evolution • Liberty/Freedom • Science

I do not think science has to make any apologies. It looks at the world and tells it like it is. And we all live longer, better lives because of this dispassionate view. Sure, it commands awe and provides inspiration. Still, I would rather be operated on by a surgeon who sees me as an assemblage of atoms than one who lovingly tries to manipulate what he or she imagines are my vital energy fields.
Science

While science continually uncovers new mysteries, it has removed much of what was once regarded as deeply mysterious. Although we certainly do not know the exact nature of every component of the universe, the basic principles of physics seem to apply out to the farthest horizon visible to us today.
Science

Alterative explanations are always welcome in science, if they are better and explain more. Alternative explanations that explain nothing are not welcome... Note how science changed those beliefs when new data became available. Religions stick to the same ancient beliefs regardless of the data.
Religion/Faith • Science

The argument from design rests on the notion that everything, but God, must come from something. However, once you agree that it is logically possible for an entity to exist that was not itself created, namely God, then that entity can just as well be the universe itself. Indeed, this is a more economical possibility, not requiring the additional hypothesis of a supernatural power outside the universe. To [creationists], it is not a matter of logic anyway, but common sense. They see no way that the universe could have just happened, without intent. "How can something come from nothing?" they continue to ask, never wondering how God came from nothing.
God • Reason/Rationality

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.
Liberty/Freedom • Philosophy • Religion/Faith

Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.
Skepticism

Those who look to science to provide evidence to bolster their faith in the fantasy of God won't find it in the ripples of the big bang.
Religion/Faith • Science

Sullivan, Morris (b. 1956)
American writer, playwright/director/producer.

Religion is another matter. Religion insists that certain things be considered facts, based purely on faith. In other words, you are supposed to believe, just because the religious view says to. The faithful will tell you, for example, that God exists in fact, in spite of the total lack of empirical evidence for God's existence. If pressed for evidence, they will come up with a series of irrational statements like, "Well, the world couldn't possibly exist unless God made it," or "There has to be a reason for all this to exist." According to the religious world-view, too, all of creation exists for the benefit of man.
God • Religion/Faith

Teller, Woolsey
American astronomer, vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism.

In educated circles the days are largely past when invisible personalities and unseen beings are supposed to have anything to do with natural phenomena. We are leaving behind us the kindergarten stage of our mental development.
Freethought • Nature • Science

Our foundations of knowledge are more solid than the epistemologists would have us believe. The hazy maze of obscurities and airy abstractions into which we have been led by verbal appeal is losing its lure: our knowledge of the world is fast becoming recognized as of sensory origin. All claims to supersensory "knowledge" rest on fraud.
Religion/Faith • Science

Thiry, Paul Henri (1723-1789)
AKA Baron d'Holbach. French philosopher and probably the first avowedly atheistic writer since the dominion of Christendom, whose Système de la Nature (The System of Nature) made the first blunt denial of any divine purpose or master plan in nature.

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.
God • Religion/Faith

What has been said of [God] is either unintelligible or perfectly contradictory; and for this reason must appear impossible to every man of common sense.
God

All children are atheists -- they have no idea of God.
Atheism/Agnosticism • God • Philosophy

Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system.
Religion/Faith

Nature tells man to consult reason, and to take it for his guide: religion teaches him that his reason is corrupted, that it is only a treacherous guide, given by a deceitful God to lead his creatures astray. Nature tells man to enlighten himself, to search after truth, to instruct himself in his duties: religion enjoins him to examine nothing, to remain in ignorance, to fear truth.
Nature • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910)
Russian writer, philosopher and social activist.

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.
Freethought • Reason/Rationality

Twain, Mark (1835-1910)
AKA Samuel Langhorne Clemens. American author, master of humor and sarcasm.

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world was flat.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Tyson, Neil deGrasse (b. 1958)
American astrophysicist and the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, New York City. Since 2006, he has hosted PBS's educational TV show NOVA scienceNOW.

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.
Evolution • Religion/Faith • Science

Let there be no doubt that, as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion... The argument is simple. I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document. Indeed, I can make an even stronger statement. Whenever people have used religious documents to make detailed predictions about the physical world they have been famously wrong.
Religion/Faith • Science

No matter who you are, engaging in the quest to discover where and how things began tends to induce emotional fervor--as if knowing the beginning bestows upon you some form of fellowship with, or perhaps governance over, all that comes later. So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going.
Evolution • Philosophy • Science

What happened before the beginning? Astrophysicists currently have no idea. Yet a certain type of religious person tends to assert, with a tinge of smugness, that something must have started it all. In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God. But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify--a multiverse, for instance? Or what if the universe, like its particles, just popped into existence from nothing? Such replies usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist on the ever-shifting frontier. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy: "The universe always was" goes unrecognized as a legitimate answer to "What was around before the beginning?" But for many religious people, the answer "God always was" is the obvious and pleasing answer to "What was around before God?"
God • Religion/Faith • Science

Vidal, Gore (b. 1925)
American author of novels, stage plays, screenplays, and essays.

Three antihuman religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the omnipotent father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the skygod and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not just for one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
God • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Reason/Rationality • Religion/Faith

Voltaire (1694-1778)
AKA François Marie Arouet. French philosopher and writer whose works epitomize the Age of Enlightenment, often attacking injustice and intolerance.

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
Religion/Faith

A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.
Religion/Faith

Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed.
Atheism/Agnosticism • Religion/Faith

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.
Religion/Faith

Washburn, Lemuel Kelley (1846-1927)
American freethinker, aphorist, and public speaker.

No church has all the truth, and no school either. So-called religion merely shows where the search after truth ended. But truth is the infinite reality, and it will always be for man to find.
Philosophy • Religion/Faith • Science

To build one house for man is better than to build a dozen houses to God.
Ethics • Philosophy • Secular Humanism

The "truths" which God revealed have been overthrown by the truths which man has discovered.
Religion/Faith • Science

An organization that requires the suppression of facts and the discouragement of knowledge in order to maintain its supremacy, is the relic of a tyranny which our free age and our free thought are in duty bound to remove from the earth.
Freethought • Religion/Faith

Take away every achievement of the world and leave man freedom, and the earth would again bloom with every glory of attainment; but take away liberty and everything useful and beautiful would vanish.
Liberty/Freedom

The doubter is the safe man; the man who can be depended upon. He does not build upon a foundation of guesswork, and the structure he erects will stand. Let us not fear doubt, but rather fear to have falsehood passed for truth.
Skepticism

Too long has this world been at the feet of the priest. Man is never in that position for his own benefit, but for the benefit of the priest.
Religion/Faith

Prayer is a hook that never caught any fish. It is a gun that never brought down any game.
Religion/Faith

No man ever got an answer to prayer that he could show to another person.
Religion/Faith

Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

Prayer is like a pump in an empty well, it makes lots of noise, but brings no water.
Religion/Faith

The measure of liberty which man enjoys determines the civilization of the age in which he lives.
Liberty/Freedom

The doctrine of salvation by faith is a libel on justice and has done more to undermine the virtue of the world than vice itself.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

The money man gives to get him into heaven is what he ought to use to improve the earth.
Secular Humanism

Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.
Religion/Faith

Do not thank God for what man does.
God • Reason/Rationality

The man who gets on his knees has not learned the right use of his legs.
Philosophy

Civilization has come about by going to school more than to church.
Religion/Faith • Science

A theologian is a person who uses the word God to hide his ignorance.
God • Religion/Faith

Weinberg, Steven (b. 1933)
American physicist and Nobel Laureate.

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.
Ethics • Religion/Faith

Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion.
Religion/Faith • Science

Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.
Philosophy • Science

This is one of the great social functions of science -- to free people from superstition.
Science

Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Issac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.
Ethics • God • Religion/Faith

Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)
American Romantic poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist.

Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world -- a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious, surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrenched, holding possession, yet remains (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Religion/Faith • Science

Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us.
Philosophy • Reason/Rationality • Secular Humanism

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
English freethinking Deist; early advocate of equality of the sexes.

How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
Reason/Rationality

Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.
Liberty/Freedom

Wright, Frances (1795-1852)
Pioneering advocate of women's equality; first U.S. woman to question the utility of religion; antislavery activist; advocate of free public schools; editor of Free Enquirer.

The hired preachers of all sects, creeds, and religions, never do, and never can, teach any thing but what is in conformity with the opinions of those who pay them.
Ethics • Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention.
Religion/Faith • Science

Instead of establishing facts, we have to overthrow errors; instead of ascertaining what is, we have to chase from our imaginations what is not.
Reason/Rationality • Secular Humanism

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)
Irish poet and dramatist.

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Zappa, Frank (1940-1993)
American composer, guitarist, singer, film director, and satirist.

I don't think there's a problem. First of all, I don't think music turns people into social liabilities. Because you hear a lyric -- there's no medical proof that a person hearing a lyric is going to act out the lyric. There's also no medical proof that if you hear any collection of vowels and consonants, that the hearing of that collection is going to send you to Hell.
Liberty/Freedom

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.
Freethought • Religion/Faith • Secular Humanism

So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity.
Religion/Faith

I don’t want to see any religious people in public office because they’re working for another boss.
Liberty/Freedom • Religion/Faith

Zola, Emile (1840-1902)
Influential French novelist and prominent example of the literary school of naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
Liberty/Freedom

Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.
Science