Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Updike

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

John Updike

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

Thomas A. Edison

So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake...Religion is all bunk.

Simon Conway Morris

Richard Dawkins is arguably England's most pious atheist.

Swami Vivekananda

Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.

Swami Vivekananda

He is an atheist who does not believe in himself. The old religions said that he was an atheist who did not believe in God. The new religion says that he is an atheist who does not believe in himself.

Penn Jillette

If you want to turn out an atheist child, unconditional love constantly is a good way to do it.

Penn Jillette

The vast majority of the world knows there's no reason to circumcise. Someone should tell the doctors.

Penn Jillette

I don't think anything gives your life joy and meaning. I think your life simply has joy and meaning. The love for my children, the love for my parents and the love for my friends is the end in itself. The meaning is life.

Penn Jillette

It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.

Penn Jillette

It's not arrogant to say that you can't figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It's not arrogant to know that there's no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who loves you personally. It's not sad to feel that life and the love of your real friends and family is more than enough to make life worth living. Isn't it much sadder to feel that there is a more important love required than the love of the people who have chosen to spend their limited time with you?

Penn Jillette

The word ‘holiday’ comes from ‘holy day’ and holy means ‘exalted and worthy of complete devotion.’ By that definition, all days are holy. Life is holy. Atheists have joy every day of the year, every holy day. We have the wonder and glory of life. We have joy in the world before the lord is come. We’re not going for the promise of life after death; we’re celebrating life before death…For atheists, everything in the world is enough and every day is holy. Every day is an atheist holiday. It’s a day that we’re alive.

Penn Jillette

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

Penn Jillette

You don’t have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is “I don’t know”.

Penn Jillette

I believe that the best way to become an atheist is to read the bible

Penn Jillette

If the bible were published as fiction, no reviewer would give it a passing grade. There are some vivid scenes and quotable phrases but there's no plot, no structure, a tremendous amount of filler and the characters are painfully one dimensional. Whatever you do, don't read the bible for a moral code. It advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition and murder. Read it because we need more atheists.

Penn Jillette

Everyday is an atheist holiday.

Penn Jillette

If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Maurice Blanchot

We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.

Matthew Tobin Anderson

I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.

Matthew Henry

A man that is endued with the powers of reason, by which he is capable of knowing, serving, glorifying, and enjoying his Maker, and yet lives without God in the world, is certainly the most despicable and the most miserable animal under the sun.

Matthew Henry

No man will say, "There is no God" 'till he is so hardened in sin that it has become his interest that there should be none to call him to account.

Neal Boortz

I don't believe in atheists.

John Fowles

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

John Fowles

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

Jonathan Haidt

The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

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.

Primo Levi

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

Plutarch

The superstitious man wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them.

Nathaniel Branden

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

Julian Huxley

Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief.

Paul Tillich

I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.

Paul Krassner

Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn't believe in.