Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robert Lewis

It is only the atheist who adopts success as the criterion of right

Julia Sweeney

I went with agnosticism for a long, long time because I just hated to say I was an atheist - being an atheist seemed so rigid. But the more I became comfortable with the word, and the more I read, it started to stick.

Richard P. Feynman

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

Richard K. Morgan

A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.

Richard Dawkins

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

Richard Dawkins

Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?

Richard Dawkins

We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.

Richard Dawkins

I've been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition.

Richard Dawkins

The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.

Richard Dawkins

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

Richard Dawkins

Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Richard Dawkins

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

Richard Dawkins

Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

Richard Dawkins

Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.

Richard Dawkins

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

Sarah Vowell

After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, "When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us."

Sara Paretsky

I'm at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.

Vladimir Lenin

Perfect definition of atheist dogma. Your mind has been subjected to subtle mental conditioning year after year. Now the atheist lie has become the truth to you. A lie that can be blown away with the real truth. It just takes time to unwind the atheist mental conditioning. The truth is out there. Outside of atheist dogma lies the truth!

Virginia Woolf

She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

Samuel Richardson

...for my master, bad as I have thought him, is not half so bad as this woman.-To be sure she must be an atheist!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.

Salman Rushdie

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

Salman Rushdie

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

Salman Rushdie

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.

William Congreve

Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Rocco Buttiglione

The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion. It is an atheist, nihilistic religion - but it is a religion that is obligatory for all

Roger Scruton

Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.

Roger Ebert

Absolutists frighten me. During all the endless discussions on my blog about evolution , intelligent design, God , and the afterworld, numbering altogether thousands of comments, I have never named my beliefs , although readers have freely informed me that I am an atheist , and agnostic , or at the very least a secular humanist which I am.

Roger Ebert

I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.

Warren Mitchell

I enjoy being Jewish, but I'm an atheist... I hate fundamentalism in all its forms. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, I think they are all potty and capable of destroying the world.