Quotations by Theme

God - Religion

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"I cannot say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives."
Abigail Adams, 1744-1818

"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events."
Adrienne Rich, 1929-

"Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human."
Agatha Christie,

"The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present."
Alan Watts, 1915-1973

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
Albert Camus, 1913-1960

"Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?"
Albert Camus, 1913-1960

"I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms."
Albert Camus, 1913-1960

"I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die."
Albert Camus, 1913-1960

"Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day."
Albert Camus, 1913-1960

"I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in Nature."
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

"I cannot believe that God plays dice with the Cosmos."
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are molded after our own-a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither do I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear of ridiculous egotisms."
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

"I am certain and have always stressed that the destination of mankind is to become more and more humane. The ideal of humanity has to be revived."
Albert Schweitzer, 1875-1965

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
Aldous Huxley,

"Which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow's Misdeeds out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?"
Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963

"It is possible to lead astray an entire generation, to strike it blind, to drive it insane, to direct it towards a false goal. Napoleon proved this."
Alexander Herzen,

"All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence. the former — of the corruption of the will."
Alexander Herzen, 1812-1870

"Death is really a great blessing for humanity, without it there could be no real progress. People who lived for ever would not only hamper and discourage the young, but they would themselves lack sufficient stimulus to be creative."
Alfred Adler, 1870-1937

"The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in."
Alfred Edward Housman, 1859-1936

"There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled."
Alfred Whitney Griswold, 1906-1963

"Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises."
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914

"Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914

"Faith; noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." "Pray; verb. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy." Mythology: The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. Scriptures; noun. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based."
Ambrose Bierce,

"Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, 1842-1914?

"The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditation on the past."
Andre Maurois, 1885-1967

"A lot of people in spiritual life use the awareness of difference, and the spiritual glorification of difference, as a justification to indulge in that which is ultimately unreal."
Andrew Cohen,

"Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place."
Angela Carter Angela Carter, 1940-1992

"In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil."
Anna Jameson, 1794-1860

"Or what about the statue in California currently said to be crying bloody tears? Why worry about the alleged weeping of a plastic effigy when so many actual human beings have reasons to cry?"
Anna Quindlen, 1953-

"[Like] a pestilence [they] cover the land; not to scatter blessings amongst the distressed, root out ignorance, ... or diffuse the lights of knowledge, to ennoble the age, or amend mankind; not to break the chains of slavery, or teach man his religious or political duties, or cultivate the arts and sciences, no; quite the reverse. Their object and their interest is to plunge mankind into ignorance, to make him a bigot, a fanatic, a hypocrite, a heathen, to hate every sect but his own, (the orthodox,) to shut his eyes against the truth, harden his heart against the distress of his fellow man, and purchase heaven by money."
Anne Newport Royall,

"No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism."
Annie Besant,

"Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd."
Annie Besant,

"For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most. This coarse and insulting way of regarding woman, as though they existed merely to be the safety-valves of men's passions, and that the best men were above the temptation of loving them, has been the source of unnumbered evils."
Annie Wood Besant, 1847-1933

"He is YOUR God. They are YOUR Rules. YOU burn in Hell!"
Anonymous,

"Religious groups should stay out of politics or be taxed."
Anonymous,

"Love is an emotion, not a deity."
Anonymous,

"Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1900-1944

"Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity."
Antonio Porchia,

"To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night -- brothers who see now they are truly brothers."
Archibald MacLeish,

"That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations."
Archibald MacLeish,

"Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable"
Archibald MacLeish,

"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."
Archibald MacLeish, 1892-1982

"To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill."
Aristotle,

"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion."
Arthur Charles Clarke, 1917-

"The Revolutionary’s Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modelled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age.... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers’ blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text."
Arthur Koestler, 1905-1983

"I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain."
Arthur Rimbaud,

"I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own."
Arthur Rimbaud,

"And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! - But the great Faith is Love!"
Arthur Rimbaud,

"As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our present-day concern for human rights.... In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights ... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide. Religion during most of the history of the West saw the trials visited on mankind in this world as ordained by the Almighty to test and purify sinful mortals.... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality; hated blasphemy; and feared heresy.... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake."
Arthur Schlesinger, 1917-

"Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief."
Arthur Schnitzler, 1862-1931

"Compassion is the basis of all morality."
Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860

"Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine."
Arthur Schopenhauer,

"Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think."
Arthur Schopenhauer,

"More and more the myths put about by these Christians are better known than the doctrines of the philosophers. Who has not heard the fable of Jesus' birth from a virgin or the stories of his crucifixion and resurrection? ... But the point is this, and the Christians would do well to heed it: One ought first to follow reason as a guide before accepting any since anyone who believes without testing a doctrine is certain to be deceived.... Just as the charlatans of the cults take advantage of the simpleton's lack of education to lead him around by the nose, so too with the Christian teachers: they do not want to give or receive reasons for what they believe. Their favorite expressions are "Do not ask questions, just believe!" and: "Your faith will save you!" "The wisdom of the world," they say, "is evil; to be simple is to be good." If only they would undertake to answer my question -- which I do not ask as one who is trying to understand their beliefs (there being little to understand!). But they refuse to answer, and indeed discourage asking questions of any sort."
Aulus Cornelius Celsus, CE First Century

"The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence."
Ayn Rand, 1905-1982

"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a "moral commandment" is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments."
Ayn Rand, 1905-1982

"If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.... The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind."
Ayn Rand,

"The incomparable stupidity of life teaches us to love our parents; divine philosophy teaches us to forgive them."
Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu,

"If we look back at the begining we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom, respect and tyranny support them, in order to make the blindness of man serve their own interest. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them."
Baron d'Holbach,

"They [the Christian Europeans] forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual's head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers' breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting: "Wriggle, you little perisher." They slaughtered anyone and everyone in their path, on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a single thrust of their swords. They spared no one, erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burn them alive thirteen at a time, in honour of our Saviour and the twelve Apostles, or tie dry straw to their bodies and set fire to it. The Christians seized all the maize the locals [of Nicaragua] had grown for themselves and their own families and, as a consequence, some twenty or thirty thousand natives died of hunger, some mothers even killing their own children and eating them. The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians."
Bartolomé de las Casas,

"The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed."
Bartolomé de las Casas,

"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."
Baruch Spinoza,

"Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd."
Baruch Spinoza,

"My studies in Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man running in and out of every hole in the Cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese."
Benjamin DeCasseres, 1893-1961

"The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance."
Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge."
Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881

"If men are so wicked (as we see them now) with religion, what would they be without it?"
Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790

"Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody."
Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790

"None are so empty as those who are full of themselves"
Benjamin Whichcote, 1609-1683

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
Bertrand Russell,

"William James used to preach "the will to believe". For my part, I should wish to preach "the will to doubt". What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
Bertrand Russell,

"The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts -- the less you know the hotter you get."
Bertrand Russell,

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
Bertrand Russell,

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970

"Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do."
Bertrand Russell,

"There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them."
Bertrand Russell,

"Are you never afraid of God's judgment in denying him? "Most certainly not. I also deny Zeus and Jupiter and Odin and Brahma, but this causes me no qualms. I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.""
Bertrand Russell,

"Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it."
Bertrand Russell,

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."
Bertrand Russell,

"Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favour of systematic hatred."
Bertrand Russell,

"My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others."
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. Fear is the main source of superstition, . . .. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. I wish to preach "the will to doubt". What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."
Bertrand Russell,

"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others."
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970

"Public education is a good foundation on which to build a better life for each of us. And if we want to prove to these children who never made the mess in the first place that education is worth the trouble, our schools have to inspire them so they can do what they ought to do. -- Bill Cosby, dismissing the theocrats' arguments for eliciting government financial support of private education, in, "Kids, Here's a Fine Mess They've Gotten Us Into," adapted from his Prologue to the book, Letters to the Next President: What We Can Do About the Real Crisis in Public Education (2004)"
Bill Cosby,

"We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities."
Bill Maher,

"To be is to be perceived (Esse est percipi). Or, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"
Bishop George Berkeley, 1685 – 1753

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction."
Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662

"Once the anchor of reason has been cut, one's craft may go anywhere. One may become a St Francis or equally a Hitler."
Brand Blanshard, 1892-1987

"The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places."
Bryant H. McGill, 1969-

"The test of a belief is not exclusively in the belief itself, but also in the intentions and actions of those who embrace it."
Bryant H. McGill, 1969-

"Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination."
Bryant H. McGill, 1969-

"Education should prepare our minds to use its own powers of reason and conception rather than filling it with the accumulated misconceptions of the past."
Bryant H. McGill, 1969-

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions only because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
Buddha, 563-483 BCE

"We preoccupy ourselves so much with changing the lives of others not out of proclaimed sentiments of selfless human charity, but out of our selfish desire to validate our own identities. There is, of course, enormous ego gratification in the exercise of power over other people, but such satisfaction is rooted in our need to have others believe and behave as we do."
Butler D Shaffer,

"Religion provides the solace for the turmoil that it creates."
Byron Danelius,

"Fear created the first gods in the world."
Caecilius Statius, 220-168 BCE

"Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence."
Camille Flammarion, 1842-1925

"We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself ... We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil."
Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-1961

"Economic distress will teach man, if anything can, that realities are less dangerous than fantasies, that fact-finding is more effective than fault-finding."
Carl Lotus Backer, 1873-1945

"To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then to go to hell after all would be too damned hard."
Carl Sandberg, 1863-1952

"I have hitherto followed the lines marked out by the Theist in his attempt to prove that there exists a "mind" behind natural phenomena, and that the universe as we have it is, at least generally, an evidence of a plan designed by this "mind." I have also pointed out that the only datum for such a conclusion is the universe we know. We must take that as a starting point. We can get neither behind it nor beyond it. We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world. Prominent among these primitive misunderstandings is the belief that man is surrounded by hosts of mysterious ghostly agencies that are afterwards given human form. These ghostly beings form the raw material from which the gods of the various religions are made, and they flourish best where knowledge is least. Of this there can be no question.... Now it would indeed be strange if primitive man was right on the one thing concerning which exact knowledge is not to be gained, and wrong about all other things on which knowledge has either been, or bids fair to be, won. All civilized peoples reject the world-theories that the savage first formulates. Is it credible that with regard to gods he was at once and unmistakably correct? It is useless saying that we do not accept the gods of the primitive world. In form, no; in essence, yes. The fact before us is that all ideas of gods can be traced to the earliest stages of human history.... [T]here is an unbroken line of descent linking the gods of the most primitive peoples to those of modern man. We reject the world of the savage; but we still, in our churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, perpetuate the theories he built upon that world."
Chapman Cohen,

"Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others."
Charles Caleb Colton, 1780-1832

"Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason."
Charles de Secondat, 1689-1755

"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life."
Charles Frohman, 1860-1915

"To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind."
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

"Eternity is not something that begins after you're dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now."
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935

"We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them."
Christian Nestell Bovee,

"For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity."
Christopher Dawson,

"Your parents they give you your life, but then try to give you their life."
Chuck Palahniuk, 1962

"The absolute truth is not a matter of opinion but nature"
Cicero, 106-43 BCE

"To say that God made the universe gives us no explanation of the beginnings of things. If we are told that God made the universe, the question immediately arises: Who made God? Did he always exist, or was there some power back of that? Did he create matter out of nothing, or is his existence coextensive with matter? The problem is still there. What is the origin of it all? If, on the other hand, one says that the universe was not made by God, that it always existed, he has the same difficulty to confront. To say that the universe was here last year, or millions of years ago, does not explain its origin. This is still a mystery. As to the question of the origin of things, man can only wonder and doubt and guess."
Clarence Seward Darrow,

"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."
Clarence Seward Darrow,

"I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil."
Clarence Seward Darrow,

"Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey."
Clarence Seward Darrow,

"I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose."
Clarence Seward Darrow, 1857-1938

"If we don't know life, how can we know death?"
Confucius, 551-479 BCE

"When we see men (or children) of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves."
Confucius, 551-479 BCE

"If we think that this search for God is a vain search, and that there is no reality to be discovered, ... then the history of religion becomes a study of the aberrations of the human mind."
Cyril Bailey,

"If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are -- like fishes not meant to swim."
Cyril Vernon Connolly, 1903-1974

"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

"The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

"Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930

"Fear not those who argue but those who dodge."
Dale Carnegie, 1888-1955

""The very concept of sin comes from the bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?" "You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say 'God is love,' they will claim that *you* are taking things out of context!" "I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being." "Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it." "You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?" "Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.""
Dan Barker,

"And of all the plagues with which mankind are cursed Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst."
Daniel Defoe,

"The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster."
David Hume, 1711-1776

"There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches and the like. All these are the work of human hands aided by money. But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard, which is the common possession of all, especially to the dealings of democracies with dictatorships. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm."
Demosthenes, 384-322BCE

"Gentleness and peacefulness regulate our proceedings; theirs are dictated by fury. We employ reason, they accumulate faggots. They preach nothing but love, and breathe nothing but blood. Their words are humane, but their hearts are cruel."
Denis Diderot, 1713-1784

"There comes a moment during which almost every girl or boy falls into melancholy; they are tormented by a vague inquietude, which rests on everything and finds nothing to calm it. They seek solitude; they weep; the silence to be found in cloister attracts them: the image of peace that seems to reign in religious houses seduces them. They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself; and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature's wish."
Denis Diderot,

"A man had been betrayed by his children, by his wife, and by his friends; some disloyal partners had ruined his fortune, and had plunged him into poverty. Pervaded with a profound hatred and contempt for the human race, he left society and took refuge alone in a cave. There, pressing his fists into his eyes, and contemplating a revenge proportional to his grievances, he said: "Evil people! What shall I do to punish them for their injustice and to make them all as unhappy as they deserve? Ah! if it were possible to imagine it -- to intoxicate them with a great fantasy to which they would attach more importance than to their lives, and about which they would never be able to agree!" Instantly he rushed out of the cave, shouting, "God! God!" Echoes without number repeated around him, "God! God!" This fearful name was carried from pole to pole, and heard everywhere with astonishment. At first men prostrated themselves, then they got up again, asked each other, argued with each other, became bitter, cursed each other, hated each other, cut each other's throats, and the fatal wish of the misanthropist was fulfilled. For such has been in the past, such will be in the future, the story of a being at all times equally important and incomprehensible."
Denis Diderot,

"Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future."
Denis Waitley,

"What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism."
Desiderius Erasmus,

"There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other."
Desiderius Erasmus,

"Historically, more people have died of religion than cancer."
Dick Francis,

"We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less."
Diogenes, 412 BC-323BC

"Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun."
Don Marquis,

"An effective counter to the endless succession of zealotry and fanaticism from one generation to the next, with its consequent ill effects on freedom of expression, thought, scientific inquiry, and behavior, would be to institute an age of consent for religious indoctrination."
Donald Henry Gudehus, 1939-

"The history of religion can be compared to a layer cake -- a mountain of layers of stale dogma, interspaced with the congealed blood of its victims, and overlaid with a sweetened opiate to make itself appealing to the gullible."
Donald Henry Gudehus,

"That cry could never be wrung from the lips of a man who saw in his own death a prearranged plan for the world's salvation, and his own return to divine glory temporarily renounced for transient misery on earth. The fictitious theology of a thousand years shrivels beneath the awful anguish of that cry. Dr. Conway, quoted from John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 314, on the alleged statement of Jesus from the Cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" (Matthew 27:46)"
Dr. Conway,

"People who cannot get interested in the variety of life, and cannot make up their own minds, get discontented over this, and they long for a hero to bow down before and to follow blindly."
E.M. Forster, 1879-1970

"If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious."
E.M. Forster, 1879-1970

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."
Edgar Allan Poe,

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Edmund Burke, 1729-1797

"Christian love is biblically defined as Holy Spirit-aided self-discipline in internalizing Christian doctrine and performing the devotional program. As manifested in and by the believer, Christian love has hardly anything to do with passion or affection."
Edmund D Cohen,

"While the Bible does not explicitly say that independent thinking is a cardinal sin -- to do so would give the game away -- it is the crux of any biblically authentic definition of sin, one incompatible with doing the devotional program."
Edmund D Cohen,

"In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head."
Edvard Munch, 1863-1944

"God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore."
Edward Abbey,

"Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State."
Edward Abbey,

"Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues."
Edward Abbey,

"Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination."
Edward Abbey,

"Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide."
Elbert Hubbard,

"The supernatural is the natural not yet understood."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915

"Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one."
Elbert Hubbard,

"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915

"Give us a religion that will help us to live -- we can die without assistance."
Elbert Hubbard,

"When certain unmarried men, who had lost their capacity to sin, sat indoors, breathing bad air, and passed resolutions about what was right and what wrong, making rules for the guidance of the people, instead of trusting to the natural, happy instincts of the individual, they ushered in the Dark Ages. These are the gentlemen who blocked human evolution absolutely for a thousand years."
Elbert Hubbard,

"Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915

"The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915

"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."
Elbert Hubbard,

"Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915

"Theology, by diverting the attention of men from this life to another, and by endeavoring to coerce all men into one religion, constantly preaching that this world is full of misery, but the next world would be beautiful -- or not, as the case may be -- has forced on men the thought of fear where otherwise there might have been the happy abandon of nature."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915

"God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915

"Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and responsibility of our existence."
Elihu Burritt,

"Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas."
Emile Cioran, 1911-1995

"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live, moreover, the only one."
Emile Cioran, 1911-1995

"No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it."
Emile Cioran, 1911-1995

"Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name."
Emma Goldman,

"Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder: Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon earth."
Emma Goldman,

"Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society."
Emma Goldman,

"Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open."
Emma Goldman, 1869-1940

"The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation."
Emma Goldman, 1869-1940

"I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made."
Emma Goldman, 1869-1940

"If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another."
Epicurus, ca. 341-270 BCE

"Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; Or he can, but does not want to; Or he cannot and does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. But, if God both can and wants to abolish evil, then how come evil is in the world?"
Epicurus,

"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business."
Eric Hoffer, 1902-83

"Thus blind faith is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action; and pride a substitute for unattainable self-respect."
Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

"The pride that at present pervades the world is the claim that one is a member of a chosen group – be it a nation, race, church or party. No other attitude has so impaired the oneness of the human species and contributed so much to the savage strife of our time."
Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

"To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance."
Eric Hoffer,

"A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self."
Eric Hoffer,

"The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not."
Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

"To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance."
Eric Hoffer,

"Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves."
Eric Hoffer,

"The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not."
Eric Hoffer,

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980

"In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980

"Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980

"The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980

"If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980

"That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980

"Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything."
Ernest Gaines, 1933-

"Every true Freethinker accords to each individual the right to mental freedom. Where this freedom leads is no concern of others so long as it encroaches not upon their rights."
Etta Semple, 1855-1914

"Human hopes and human creeds/Have their root in human needs."
Eugene Fitch Ware, 1841-1911

"In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes ... in the name of love of one's country or of one's race one hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end ... ideologies and religions ... are the alibis of the means."
Eugène Ionesco, 1912-94

"There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation."
Eugène Ionesco,

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