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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
--Voltaire
Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
--Bertrand Russell
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them---given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by---to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades.
--Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
There is in every village a torch---the teacher; and an extinguisher---the clergyman.
--Victor Hugo
Mark Twain once remarked that there is not an acre of land on the globe in the hands of its rightful owners. One might add that there is not a religious idea, ritual or practice that has not been lifted from someone else.
--David Bumbaugh
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
--Reinhold Niebuhr
The idea of a personal god is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.
--Einstein
...if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying...it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
--Carl Sagan
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
--Emerson
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchcal – God is the Omnipotent Father – hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
--Gore Vidal
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 ‘til the end of time...But He loves you!
--George Carlin
There isn't necessarily two sides to a story if only one side has all the verifiable facts on their side.
--David Sirota
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from others.
--Mark Twain
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
--Bertrand Russell
By religion I mean a set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual.
--Bertrand Russell
Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager, young minds. Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalists by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue.
--Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 286
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