Famous Quotes & Sayings

H. L. Mencken

Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.

H. L. Mencken

When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.

H. P. Lovecraft

All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

George Herbert

The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition.

Gary Kemp

I'm an atheist. I don't 'believe' at all.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Historical refutation as the definitive refutation.- In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God - today one indicates how the belief that there is a God arose and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous.- When in former times one had refuted the 'proofs of the existence of God' put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods.

Francis Quarles

Make philosophy thy journey, theology thy journey's end: philosophy is a pleasant way, but dangerous to him that either tires or retires; in this journey it is safe neither to loiter nor to rest, till thou hast attained thy journey's end; he that sits down a philosopher rises up an atheist.

Ian Mcewan

Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.

Ian Mcewan

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

Homer

See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly.

Hu Shih

Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.

The atheist worldview of life is a materialistic culture that frees humanity from superstition.

Howard Stern

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

Howard Stern

I am circumcised, and I tell you something, I despise it. I despise it. I despise it... I am completely pissed off that I'm circumcised.

Honore de Balzac

A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.

Honore de Balzac

A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

Jacques Derrida

I rightly pass for an atheist.

James Freeman Clarke

The atheist has no hope.

Isaac Asimov

Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

Isaac Asimov

Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.

Isaac Asimov

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it.

Isaac Asimov

I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.

Isaac Asimov

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

Isaac Asimov

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

Michael Newdow

because I am an atheist and this offends me.

Miles Franklin

Ah, the bitter, hopeless heart-hunger of godlessness none but an atheist can understand!

Marcel Proust

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

Jose Saramago

En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.

Jonathan Swift

... the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion ... that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To have a positive religion is not necessary. To be in harmony with yourself and the universe is what counts, and this is possible without positive and specific formulation in words.

John C. Wright

One of the things that made me suffer no regret when I was called away from the cramped intellectual jail of atheism into a wider and more wonderful world, was my growing conviction that my fellow atheists were shallow, men without insight into real human nature.