Atheism Quotes - Page 18

Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.

Parsons always seem to be specially horrified about things like sunbathing and naked bodies. They don't mind poverty and misery and cruelty to animals nearly as much.

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)

An error becomes an error when born as truth.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

We live our lives for our life's sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we're dead.

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss'd Of the Two Worlds so wisely - they are thrust Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with Dust.

He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity - a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.

Mr. Lincoln had no hope, and no faith, in the usual acceptation of those words.

I was being foolish. An atheist can't stand behind their assertion that God doesn't exist. The stupidest thing I ever could have done was to reject His Truth.

There is in the clergy of all Christian denominations a time-serving, cringing, subservient morality, as wide from the spirit of the gospel as it is from the intrepid assertion and vindication of truth.

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know.

Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.

Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art".

A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers-including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.

Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.

Science can have no quarrel with a religion which postulates a God to whom men are His children.

Pascal makes no attempt in this most famous argument to show that his Roman Catholicism is true or probably true. The reasons which he suggests for making the recommended bet on his particular faith are reasons in the sense of motives rather than reasons in the sense of grounds. Conceding, if only for the sake of the present argument, that we can have no knowledge here, Pascal tries to justify as prudent a policy of systematic self-persuasion, rather than to provide grounds for thinking that the beliefs recommended are actually true.

You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject.

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.

It matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane: if they gain us our freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God.