"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."
— Abraham Lincoln
"I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."
— Albert Camus
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
— Albert Einstein
"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses."
— Albert Einstein
"I have concluded through careful, empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. His name is "me"."
— Andrew Tobias
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
— Benjamin Franklin
"Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes."
— Bertrand Russell
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
— Blaise Pascal
"The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."
— Charles Darwin
"Religion poisons everything."
— Christopher Hitchens
"Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence."
— Christopher Hitchens
"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it."
— Christopher Hitchens
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."
— Delos McKown
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
— Douglas Adams
"I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously."
— Douglas Adams
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
"Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?"
— Friedrich Nietzsche
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."
— Gene Roddenberry
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
— George Bernard Shaw
"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever until the end of time! But He loves you."
— George Carlin
"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism."
— George Carlin
"It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible."
— George W. Foote
"The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion."
— John Stuart Mill
"Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer."
— Madalyn Murray O'Hair
"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has."
— Martin Luther
"God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on."
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
"God is a hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."
— Richard Burton
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction."
— Richard Dawkins
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
— Richard Dawkins
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
— Richard Dawkins
"Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever."
— Sam Harris
"Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious."
— Sam Harris
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
— Seneca
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
— Stephen Roberts
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
— Steven Weinberg
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
— Thomas Edison
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."
— Thomas Jefferson
"In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty."
— Thomas Jefferson
"The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing."
— Thomas Paine
"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."
— Thomas Paine
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God."
— Thomas Paine
"The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Life on Earth is 3.8 billion years old. Homo sapiens is about 200,000 years old. Your God was invented about 5,000 years ago. Think about that."
— Various skeptics
"Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings."
— Victor Stenger
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
— Voltaire
