Famous Quotes & Sayings

Stanley Hauerwas

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.

A strict observer is one who would be an atheist under an atheistic king.

Vincent Van Gogh

That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such- be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, t

That helps me get through any tough time in my life. There's so many ways you can run away from it, but when push comes to shove, the truth is going to look you right in the face. You can be an atheist and all that, but when stuff is hitting the fan, it makes you question some things. Things don't just happen. They happen for a reason.

It is wrong that they would force people to recite this reference to God. It has a complete disregard for atheist students.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

Dan Fouts

I'm a polyatheist - there are many gods I don't believe in.

Cormac McCarthy

Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

Cliff Stearns

Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the Ten Commandments are a historical document that contains moral, ethical, and legal truisms that any person of any religion or even an atheist can recognize and appreciate.

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.

Bjork

I think religion is a mistake - I'm exhausted by its self-righteousness. I think atheists should start screaming for attention like religious folks do.

Bill O'Reilly

Atheists well understand that Christmas is the most visible display of religion in the world, and that any diminishment of it is a good thing to militant secularists.

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.

Stephen Jay Gould

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

Stephen Jay Gould

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists

There is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. During an ambush, you're praying for everything and anything you can think of.

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.

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

Kurt Vonnegut

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).

Kurt Vonnegut

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.

Kurt Vonnegut

People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.

Ernestine Rose

It is an interesting and demonstrable fact that all children are atheists and were not religion inculcated in their minds, they would remain so.

Ernestine Rose

Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good; and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness.

Evangeline Lilly

The people on my mum's side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad's side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.

Christopher Hitchens

Atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it.

Christopher Hitchens

All this could be part of a plan. There is no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn't it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the pope can tell people not to jerk off.

Christopher Hitchens

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.

Christopher Hitchens

If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

Christopher Hitchens

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

Christopher Hitchens

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.