Famous Quotes & Sayings

Daniel J. Boorstin

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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 or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Czeslaw Milosz

Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.

Clarence Darrow

I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.

Daniel Dennett

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.

Daniel Dennett

I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it's art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I'd like to add a little to that goodness.

Alexander Pope

Atheists put on false courage and alacrity in the midst of their darkness and apprehensions, like children who, when they fear to go in the dark, will sing for fear.

Alexander Pope

An atheist is but a mad, ridiculous derider of piety, but a hypocrite makes a sober jest of God and religion; he finds it easier to be upon his knees than to rise to a good action.

E. M. Forster

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

E. M. Forster

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.

Douglas MacArthur

There are no atheists in the foxholes of Bataan...

Doug Stanhope

You never hear in the news, 'Two hundred killed today when atheist rebels took heavy shelling from the agnostic stronghold in the north.'

Douglas Adams

If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn't the forces of natural selection that designed fish, It must have been an Italian.

Douglas Adams

People will then often say, 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)

Douglas Adams

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.

Douglas Adams

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Douglas Adams

God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.

Daniel Radcliffe

I'm an atheist, but I'm very relaxed about it. I don't preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do.

Daniel Radcliffe

I’m an atheist, and a militant atheist when religion starts impacting on legislation.

Daniel Dennett

You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.

David Cronenberg

It was apparent to me that religion was an invented thing, a wish-fulfillment thing, a fantasy thing. It was much more real, dangerous, to accept that mortality was the end for you as an individual. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife, so if you're thinking of murder, if your subject is murder, then that's a physical act of absolute destruction because you're ending something, a body, that is unique. That person never existed before, will never exist again, will not be karmically recycled, will not go to heaven, therefore I take it seriously.

David Attenborough

I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…

David Lloyd George

The conventional heaven with its angels perpetually singing etc nearly drove me mad in my youth and made me an atheist for ten years. My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated.

Dane Cook

What am I supposed to say to an atheist when he sneezes, ah, when you die nothing happens.

Dolly Parton

You don't see too many atheists on the deathbed. They all start cramming then.

Dinesh D'Souza

Look at Satan's reason for rebelling against God. It's not that he doesn't recognize that God is greater than he is. He does. It's just that he doesn't want to play by anybody else's rules. This idea that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven is Satan's motto, and it turns out that this is also the motto of contemporary atheists such as Christopher Hitchens.

Dinesh D'Souza

And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a "new man" and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist.

Desmond Tutu

Beware when you take on the Church of God. Others have tried and have bitten the dust.

Deepak Chopra

I used to be an atheist until I realized that I was God.

Amber Heard

Even though I don't believe in God, I feel strangely compelled to fight the atheist label.

Amiri Baraka

Atheist Jews double crossers stole our [black people’s] secrets. . . . They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves . . . . Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab’s head.

Amish Tripathi

I turned atheist in the 90s when India went through troubled times - communal riots, bomb blasts... Mumbai, where I live, was badly affected. I blamed religion; also, extremists on both sides - right and left.

Andy Rooney

Every one starts out being an atheist.