Atheism Quotes - Page 8

The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.

Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

We grovel and "worship" and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

If you believe in evolution and naturalism then you have a reason not to think your faculties are reliable.

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.

[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.

The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.

If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.

The Gods are but names for the forces of Nature themselves.

The clear and perfect truth no man has seen, nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things...; for, however perfect what he says may be, yet he does not know it; all things are matters of opinion.

Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, is religion; not allowed, superstition.

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.

Thermodynamics, correctly interpreted, does not just allow Darwinian evolution; it favors it.

The Government of the United States possesses no power whatever over the question of religion.

The essential mark of the agitator is the high value he places on the emotional response of the public. Whether he attacks or defends social institutions is a secondary matter.