(http://atheistfoundation.org.au/)
Quotes
Robert G. Ingersoll (/quote/robert-g-ingersoll/)
The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of
disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany and astronomy
does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not
know that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
H. L. Mencken (/quote/h-l-mencken/)
To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride.
— H. L. Mencken
Mencken, H.L. (1920). "Coda". Smart Set, December.
Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (/quote/cardinal-robert-bellarmine/)
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus
was not born of a virgin.
— Cardinal Robert Bellarmine
Trial of Galileo, 1615
Karen Armstrong (/quote/karen-armstrong/)
My neurologist once told me that people with temporal lobe epilepsy are very often
intensely religious. Certainly just before I have a grand mal fit I have a ‘vision’ of such
peace, joy and significance that I can only call it God. What does this say about the
whole nature of religious vision? Certain episodes in the lives of the saints have
acquired a new meaning for me. When Theresa of Avila had her three-day vision of hell,
was she simply having a temporal lobe attack? The horrors she saw are similar to those
I have experienced, but in her case informed by the religious imagery of her time. Like
other saints who have ‘seen’ hell she describes an appalling stench, which is part of an
epileptic aura. Is it possible that the feeling I have had all my life that something – God,
perhaps? – is just over the horizon, something unimaginable but almost tangibly present,
is simply the result of an electrical irregularity in my brain? It is a question that can’t yet
be answered, unless it be that God, if He exists, could have created us with that capacity
for Him, glimpsed at only when the brain is convulsed. What I can say, however, is that if
my ‘visions’ have sometimes let me into ‘Hell’ they have also given me possible
intimations of a Heaven which I would not have been without.
— Karen Armstrong
Armstrong, K. (1983). Beginning the World. New York: St Martin's Press.
Bertrand Russell (/quote/bertrand-russell/)
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because
they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
— Bertrand Russell
Russell, B. (1996). The Conquest of Happiness. New York: Liveright.
Joe Simpson (/quote/joe-simpson/)
My mother was Southern Irish, and I was brought up as a devout Catholic. In fact, at one
point I thought I’d become a priest, but I’d have made an appalling priest anyway… At
16, I asked all these monks some serious questions and they didn’t come up with the
answers, and I just decided I didn’t believe in God.
— Joe Simpson
Denton, A. (Interviewer & Executive Producer), & Jacoby, A. (Executive Producer). (2003). Mountaineer Joe
Simpson [Television program segment]. In Enough Rope. Sydney: ABC Television.
Robert G. Ingersoll (/quote/robert-g-ingersoll-2/)
Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Margaret Sanger (/quote/margaret-sanger/)
No Gods – No Masters.
— Margaret Sanger
Arthur Schopenhauer (/quote/arthur-schopenhauer/)
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Percy Bysshe Shelley (/quote/percy-bysshe-shelley/)
If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Clarence Darrow (/quote/clarence-darrow/)
I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.
— Clarence Darrow
Voltaire (/quote/voltaire/)
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
— Voltaire
Gene Roddenberry (/quote/gene-roddenberry/)
I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of
their free will – and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject
them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.
— Gene Roddenberry
Jean-Paul Sartre (/quote/jean-paul-sartre/)
Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist.
Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
George Bernard Shaw (/quote/george-bernard-shaw/)
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. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and
dangerous quality.
— George Bernard Shaw
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (/quote/elizabeth-cady-stanton/)
The Bible and Church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women’s
emancipation.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Oscar Wilde (/quote/oscar-wilde/)
Truth in matters of religion is simply the opinion that has survived.
— Oscar Wilde
Susan B. Anthony (/quote/susan-b-anthony/)
The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the
command of God.
— Susan B. Anthony
Stephen Hawking (/quote/stephen-hawking/)
The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe
that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their
existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any
poverty.
— Stephen Hawking
Douglas Adams (/quote/douglas-adams/)
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
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