Great Thinkers on God and Religion

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

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough."
Aldous Huxley

" 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."
Issac Asimov

"All thinking men are atheists."
Ernest Hemingway

"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

"Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge. "
Ayn Rand

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies."
Benjamin Franklin

"Religions are the cradle of Despotism."
Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade

"My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I'm agnostic."
Carl Sagan

"Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . 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."
Bertrand Russell

"Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world."
Francois Marie Aouret "Voltaire"

"They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly. ... Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit."
Galileo Galilei

"So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is truth?"
Friedrich Nietzsche

"All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race – before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its God to be truthful and understandable in his communications."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."
Napoleon Bonaparte

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."
Frank Lloyd Wright

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
Denis Diderot

"History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."
Robert Heinlein

"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian."
Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain"

"A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows."
Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain"

"Forgive, O Lord, my little joke on Thee and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me." (hahahaha, love this one!)
Robert Frost

"I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create."
Vincent Van Gogh

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."
Thomas Jefferson

"I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul.... No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our desire to go on living … our dread of coming to an end."
Thomas Edison

"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis."
Sigmund Freud

"We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another"
Jonathan Swift

"When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it."
Oscar Wilde

"FAITH: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
RELIGION: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
PRAY: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy."
Ambrose Bierce

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."
Seneca

"I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but ignorance."
Cristopher Marlowe

"The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one."
David Hume

"People should reject God defiantly in order to pour out all their loving solicitude upon mankind. "
Albert Camus

"By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none."
Sir Charles Spencer, "Charles Chaplin"

"The idea of God negates our freedom. Traditional religion tells us that we must conform to God's idea of humanity to become fully human."
Jean Paul Sartre

"Religion is the projection of human wishes and is a form of alienation."
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

"There is no Absolute, no Reason, no God, no Spirit at work in the world: nothing but brute instinctive will to live. "
Arthur Schonpenhauer

"Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions."
Blaise Pascal

"You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend." (HAHAHAHAHA)
Richard Jeni

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
Epicurus

"As people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers."
Robert Ingersoll

"We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected." (Quite impressing, christians have an awful lot to learn from him, don't you think?)
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

"Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue."
Sir Francis Bacon

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."
Richard Dawkins

"All that my work has shown is that you don't have to say that the way the universe began was the personal whim of God?"
Stephen Hawking

"The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... logic can be happily tossed out the window."
Stephen King

"The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind."
Edgar Allan Poe

"All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
Thomas Paine

"The world holds two classes of men -- intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."
Abu'l Ala al Ma'arri

"Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the Church teaches."
Saint Thomas Aquinas

"All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science."
Matthew Arnold

"I am an atheist still, thank God."
Luis Buñuel

"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it."
Thomas Carlyle

"Prayer has no place in the public schools, just like facts have no place in organized religion."
School Superintendent in "The Simpsons"

"Atheism is a way of humility. It's to think oneself to be an animal, as we are actually and to allow oneself to become human."
Andre Comte-Sponville

"All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies."
Baron d'Holbach

"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?"
Percy Shelley

"I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular, and thus would everyone ascribe his own attributes to god."
Baruch Spinoza

"Religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few."
Stendhal

"Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat."
Emile Zola