Atheism Quotes - Page 77

We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us.

And fragile is thy tenure of this world Still haunted by the monstrous ghost of God. ("To Science")

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

Essentially I see the new atheism as largely part of the crisis of the left. Having failed to carry through its agenda in relation to political and economic life it's rounding on religion, ignoring the fact that, in some key respects, many believers are likely to share leftist aspirations.

A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.

If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that one could not get proof of his existence.

I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alleged method of acquiring knowledge, is totally invalid and as a consequence, all propositions of faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason.

Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation.

'Tis a strange thing, Sam, that among us people can't agree the whole week, because they go different ways upon Sundays.

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?

A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.

It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.

God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.

Biographies by preachers are of no value. If they admire a man they always make him a saint, while if they dislike one, they always make him a demon.

When the Amherst sphinx styled herself a pagan, she meant she didn't believe in the biblical God. What sort of deity, if any, she did believe in is hard to pinpoint.

Science not only hasn't found God, it isn't even looking for him.

For most cosmologists, a supernatural God is an unnecessary hypothesis. For most Americans, He is an unassailable fact. The American belief machine apparently has a fail-safe component. Nothing shuts it down.

True believers aren't about to be seduced by the facts.

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.

The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away its ordure. This function is performed by persons, relationships, professions, the fatherland, the world, or finally, for the really arrogant - I mean our modern pessimists - by the Good God himself.

Sins are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be sinning.

For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true. Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will. Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.