Atheist Quotes

I was shamed.My son, Bill, who was 14 come to me and said: "Mother, you've been professing that you're an atheist for a long time now. Well, I don't believe in God either, but every day in school I'm forced to say prayers, and I feel like a hypocrite. Why should I be compelled to betray my beliefs?" I couldn't answer him.

I went into the Army, and one day, in the middle of a bull session, somebody called me an atheist. Believe it or not, it was the first time I'd ever heard the word. It goes to show you how a person can grow up in America and have a college education and still not know a goddamned thing.

Millennials, in particular, consider themselves to be spiritual, but they're not necessarily going to anybody's church. It's not like the world is becoming hardcore, Richard Dawkins-atheist, but people are looking to sort of synthesize science - people love science, especially the millennials.

[Nikola Tesla] said he had no interest in the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and he just thought all these people were being superstitious and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist.

I had begun to read books and things and, in fact, one of the persons who started me thinking seriously was an atheist that I, another negro inmate whom I'd heard in a discussion with white inmates and who was able to hold his own at all levels. And he impressed me with his knowledge, and I began to listen very carefully to some of the things he said.

I don't know if anybody from my tribe of atheists ever thanked [Barack Obama] for giving us a shout-out at your first inaugural, but you did mention non-believers. We appreciate it. Because we do feel like untouchables to a degree.

We should foster a culture in which people's private religious beliefs, including atheists and agnostics, are respected.

Here is book called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, written by a couple of Christian apologists, which is essentially saying I don't pretend enough to know things I don't know to be an atheist.

Atheist n. A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others.

I'm not a militant atheist, just an atheist. In fact, in a largely atheist country like the UK I think it's a bit silly to be a militant atheist.

God exist whether or not men may choose to believe in Him. The reason why many people do not believe in God is not so much that it is intellectually impossible to believe in God, but because belief in God forces that thoughtful person to face the fact that he is accountable to such a God.

If you trace back all those links in the chain that had to be in place for me to be here, the laws of probability maintain that my very existence is miraculous. But then after however many decades, less than a hundred years, they disburse and I cease to be. So while they're all congregated and coordinated to make me, then-and I speak her on behalf of all those trillions of atoms-I should really make the most of things.

You're like this little blip of light that lasts for a very brief time and you can shine as brightly as you choose.

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.

Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.

I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.

Thank God I'm an atheist.

Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.

I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made.

All thinking men are atheists.

I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for people.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster? To see rare effects, and no cause ; a motion, without a mover ; a circle, without a centre ; a time, without an eternity ; a second, without a first : these are things so against philosophy and natural reason, that he must be a beast in understanding who can believe in them. The thing formed, says that nothing formed it ; and that which is made is, while that which made it is not, This folly is infinite.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.

The habit of arguing in support of atheism, whether it be done from conviction or in pretense, is a wicked and impious practice.

Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.

If some should accuse us as if we held that people born before the time of Christ were not accountable to God for their actions, we shall anticipate and answer such a difficulty. We have been taught that Christ is the first-begotten of God, and we have declared him to be the Logos of which all mankind partakes. Those, therefore, who lived according to reason (logos) were really Christians, even though they were thought to be atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates, Heraclitus and others like them.

The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions.

I have a great respect for the flag, (but) if the government passed a law saying that I had to pledge allegiance to the flag, I don't think I would do it. I've always felt that I lived in a country...where if I wanted to worship God as a Baptist, I could do so. If I were an atheist, I could be one. If I wanted to be a Catholic but was born a Jew, there's no condemnation...from a government authority.

I was brought up Catholic. I'm lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I'm an atheist. I think religion does a lot for us but I can't quite believe it, alas... It's just a personal choice. I love the idea of heaven though. Who doesn't? It's lovely.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.

But the lack of faith could just as well be a crutch for non-believers, allowing them to live their lives without any concept of accountability and giving them some sort of false confidence. The different is that while Catholicism has an abundance of intellectual underpinnings to support its arguments, anti-Catholicism and atheist have few if any.

Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality - it's just a different morality than the loud voices of the Christian morality.... I can't tell you how many films I've turned down because there was an absence of morality. And I don't mean that from any sort of Judeo-Christian-Muslim point of view. I'm not saying they're wrong and can't be made. But, fundamentally, I'm such a humanist that I can't bear to make films that make us feel humanity is more dark than it is light.

Even if the absence of evidence for a given god were not evidence of its absence, it would still be evidence that the belief in that god is unreasonable. That's the only proposition that any atheist of any kind has to demonstrate in order to win the argument. Because anything beyond that... is just having fun.