Sometimes believers claim that Adolf Hitler was an atheist and that killing Jews has nothing to do with religion. So... Adolf Hitler – “Mein Kampf”, Volume One: A Reckoning, 2. Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna: “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” – the words of a true “atheist” :).

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe.

A thinking person, like a street lamp, is pelted with stones by the lovers of darkness.

Faith is free until you choose a god; after that you have to worship him.

Let us not see what they do, let us listen to what they say – and we shall become blind.

The easiest way to create a paradise for yourself is by talking... about other people’s tomorrow.

The logical thoughts of unbelievers do not fit into any logic of faith.

They say there is no God, and yet how many want to be him.

We compare truth to God, although gods are not always truthful.

Christians and camels receive their burdens kneeling.

Nothing is more logical than persecution. Religious tolerance is a kind of infidelity.

Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.

Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure.

For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as of a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despised women the most.

Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of him was made possible to human thought.

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. Moreover, they less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

If the plectrum and the shuttle could move themselves, slavery would be unnecessary.

Men imagine the gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

Kill them; for the Lord knoweth them that are His.

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilization. It has kept mankind in slavery and oppression.

Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth.

I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence. <...> The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

... must be the reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts. They know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance.

Any fool can KNOW! The point is . . . to understand!

In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in such parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

There is not any thing, which has contributed so much to delude mankind in religious matters, as mistaken apprehensions concerning supernatural inspiration or revelation; not considering, that all true religion originates from reason, and can no otherwise be understood, but by the exercise and improvement of it.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

It is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

Knowledge is power.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There’s a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody’s values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.

People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.

A lively, disinterested, persistent liking for truth is extraordinarily rare. Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism and doubt.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults – a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

CREATOR. A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Don’t let Krusty’s death get you down, boy. People die all the time, just like that. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow. Well, good night.

Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else – and it hasn’t – it’s that girls should stick to girls’ sports, such as hot-oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and such-and-such.

Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.

Stealing! How could you? Haven’t you learned anything from that guy who gives those sermons at church? Captain What’s-his-name?

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make of themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people dare do it, except, sometimes, as an anonymous part of a mob. To rebel against the “scientific establishment,” however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounce it.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

I don’t believe that I’m ever going to heaven or hell. I think that when I die there will be nothingness.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it’s not just a trick of the devil.

No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavour to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons everything it touches.

There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of (as contradistinguished from) morality.

Phylosophy which is the result of Reason, is the first, the original Revelation of The Creator to his Creature, Man. When this Revelation is clear and certain, by Intuition or necesary Induction, no subsequent Revelation supported by Prophecies or Miracles can supercede it.

The tears shed and still being shed by monks and nuns alone, if you gathered them all, would make a deep lake, in which all Catholic theologians and promoters of suffering ought to be drowned.

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God’s work.

In every age “the good old days” were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.

The True Fanatic is a theocrat, someone who sees himself as acting on behalf of some super-personal force: the Race, the Party, History, the Proletariat, the Poor, and so on. These absolve him from evil, hence he may safely do anything in their service.

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

[Disestablishment was] the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.

Miracles are doomed; they will drop out, like fairies or witchcraft, from among the matters which serious people believe.

The gods of men are sillier than their kings and queens . . . and emptier and more powerless.

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.

Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.

Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians – all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.

Religion is a collective insanity.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

Theology is the science of the divine lie.

We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians or poets: the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.

Whatever else I might have been inclined to think of [President George W.] Bush’s call for comity, with his simple little request, his assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks VapoRub for the national charley horse, it was clear that his hands were reaching for any hands but mine.

When I sent out a casual and nonscientific poll of my own to a wide cast of acquaintances, friends and colleagues, I was surprised, but not really, to learn that maybe 60 percent claimed a belief in a God of some sort, including people I would have bet were unregenerate skeptics. Others just shrugged. They don’t think about this stuff. It doesn’t matter to them. They can’t know, they won’t beat themselves up trying to know and for that matter they don’t care if their kids believe or not.

A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.

The most genuine and efficacious charity is that which greases the paws of the priests; such charity covers a multitude of sins.

The son of God is the same thing as the son of man; the son of man is the same thing as God his father, and God his father is the same thing as his son and his Holy Spirit. This language may seem gibberish to those who have no faith, but the Sorbonne sees nothing very embarrassing in it.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

Whenever an important event, a revolution, or a calamity turns to the profit of the church, such is always signalised as the Finger of God.

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate and reckless of consequence, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to introduce notions of the gods, and the belief in punishment after death.

What’s a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.

There is an illusion of central position, justifying one’s own purposes as right and everybody else’s as wrong, and providing a proper degree of paranoia. Righteous ends, thus proved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.

Now there are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow any one to win a clear title to learning, namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.

It is not by the sword or the spear, by soldiers or by armed force that truth is to be promoted, but by counsel and gentle persuasion.

A CREDULOUS MAN <...> He finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are, the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such.

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals – justice or progress or the happiness of future generations <...> or emancipation of a nation or race or class <...>. This is the belief that somewhere <...> there is a final solution.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

The only excuse for God is that he doesn’t exist.

God has no place within these walls, just like facts have no place within organized religion.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.

For example, an unassembled bicycle that arrives at your house in a shipping carton is in a state of disorder. You supply the energy of your muscles (which you get from food that came ultimately from sunlight) to assemble the bike. You have got order from disorder by supplying energy. The Sun is the source of energy input to the Earth’s living systems and allows them to evolve.

The whole Christian theology is that god came down to experience life through his son. Well, how’s he experiencing life if he doesn’t get laid? Give me a break. And why would he not get laid, as he created the apparatus in the first place?

As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.

What can I hope when all is right?

What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise, and their conscience that it is wrong.

If God needs your help, he’s not God.

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.

The life of believers is in God’s hands, which is why they have such bad luck.

Truth can never be reached by just listening to the voice of an authority.

When socialism comes into power, the Roman Church will advocate socialism with the same vigor [with which] it is now favoring feudalism and slavery.

When you die, you actually do become closer to God, because you won’t exist.