Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Darwin

In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God ... I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

Charles Darwin

Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.

Charles Darwin

It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist. ... I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.

Aristophanes

Surely you do not believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?

Brian Williams

Because we are no different from any animal, any insect or germule. We are not special, Cal. You, me, we all came from nothing, and that's exactly where we're all going one day, maybe soon, whether we like it or not.

Edward Young

By night an atheist half-believes in God.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.

Conan O'Brien

Pope Francis said that atheists are still eligible to go to heaven. To return the favor, atheists said Popes are still eligible to go into a void of nothingness.

Ian Mcewan

Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.

Albert Camus

Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

Albert Camus

Je puis nier une chose sans me croire obligé de la salir ou de retirer aux autres le droit d'y croire.

Albert Camus

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

Annie Besant

The Atheist waits for proof of God. Till that proof comes he remains, as his name implies, without God. His mind is open to every new truth, after it has passed the warder Reason at the gate.

Annie Besant

The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God.

Annie Dillard

Then why did you tell me?

Annie Dillard

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

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.

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…

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.