Literary Atheists A to B, Quotes

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 refuse to prove that I exist” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.” “Oh,” says man, “but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn’t it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don’t. Q.E.D.” “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
— Douglas Adams

The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
— John Adams

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religions in it.
— John Adams

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
— Steve Allen

No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.
— Steve Allen

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
— Isaac Asimov

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.
— Isaac Asimov

Creationists make it sound as though a theory is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
— Isaac Asimov

The Bible contains legendary, historical and ethical contents. It is quite possible to consider them separately, and one doesn’t have to accept the legends in order to get the ethics. Fundamentalists make a grave mistake to insist on the letter of the writings, because they drive away many who can’t swallow the Adam-and-Eve bit.
— Isaac Asimov

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
— Isaac Asimov

My spell-checker lacks the word ‘creationism’ in its dictionary, so each time that word is encountered, an alternative pops up at the bottom of my screen, ‘cretinism’.
— E.T. Babinski

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
— Mikhail Bakunin

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?
— Dan Barker

If you love God, burn the church.
— Jello Biafra

Bible, n.: A divinely inspired book, admirably suited for the needs of one’s neighbors.
— Ambrose Bierce

Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
— Ambrose Bierce

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
— Ambrose Bierce

Impiety, n.: Your irreverence toward my deity.
— Ambrose Bierce

Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.
— Ambrose Bierce

Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
— Ambrose Bierce

Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
— Ambrose Bierce

Scriptures: the sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
— Ambrose Bierce

We have fossils… We win!
— Lewis Black (on creationism)
 
Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
— Napoleon Bonaparte

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
— David Brooks

If the bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it.
— William Jennings Bryan

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
— John Buchan

Believing in gods always causes confusion.
— Pearl S. Buck

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.
— Pearl S. Buck

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
— Charles Bukowski

Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
— Jeff Burroughs

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
— Richard Francis Burton


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