Atheism Quotes - Page 61

Education teaches people how to think, while propaganda teaches people what to think.

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.

Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.

It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission.

The temerity to believe in nothing.

The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal.

The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct, seem always to have perceived.

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

That she does not crouch today where St Paul tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave enough to ignore St Paul, and rise superior to his God.

I certainly never believed, more or less, in the "essential doctrines" of Christianity, which represent God as the predestinator of men to sin and perdition, and Christ as their rescuer from that doom. I never was more or less behuiled by the trickery of language by which the perdition of man is made out to be justice, and his redemption to be mercy.

Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.

The religion of the atheist has a God-shaped blank at it's heart.

I know that human prejudice - especially that growing out of race and religion - is cruelly inveterate and lasting.

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.

Atheism is too theological.

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear.

We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it.

But let me open up my heart to you completely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not being a god! Hence, there areno gods. I drew this conclusion, to be sure--but now it draws me.

Why doncha come on over to the house and I'll show 'em to ya?

A storm is coming; our storm. Emperor - we come for you!

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

If the gods do evil then they are not gods.

And when your minister asks you for money for missionary purposes, tell him there are higher, and holier, and nobler missions to be performed at home. When he asks for colleges to educate ministers, tell him you must educate woman, that she may do away with the necessity of ministers, so that they may be able to go to some useful employment.