Famous Quotes & Sayings

Epicurus

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Epicurus

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Karen Armstrong

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

Katharine Hepburn

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

Josh McDowell

The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not.

Laurell K. Hamilton

An atheist waving a cross at a vampire was a truly pitiful sight.

Lisa Bonet

Both of my parents would say they were atheists, so where I inherited my connection to God I don't know. But it's natural. No Bible, no Torah, just the love religion.

Jonathan Swift

An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.

Jonathan Safran Foer

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.

Napoleon Bonaparte

You think you are too intelligent to believe in God. I am not like you.

Napoleon Bonaparte

A man cannot become an atheist merely by wishing it.

Napoleon Bonaparte

I would believe any religion that could prove it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, and Mohammed I do not think there is such a one. All religions owe their origin to man.

Napoleon Bonaparte

All religions have been made by men.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.

Mary Doria Russell

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they've learned, I'd find quarks and God just like they did.

Martin Buber

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.

Martin Amis

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

Pope John Paul II

Only faith in Christ gives rise to a culture contrary to egotism and death.

Pierre Charron

All religions are pieced together out of elements which seem so at odds with reason that any intelligence laughs at them.

Pope Francis

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! 'Father, the atheists?' Even the atheists. Everyone!

Pete Seeger

According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes, I'm looking at God. Whenever I'm listening to something, I'm listening to God.

Simon Hoggart

I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else.

Robert Andrews Millikan

To me it is unthinkable that a real atheist could be a scientist.

Robert A. Heinlein

An armed society is a polite society.

Robert A. Heinlein

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

Robert A. Heinlein

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

Robert A. Heinlein

The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.

Tom Stoppard

There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.