George Carlin
1. Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has 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 list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.
2. Atheism: A non-prophet organization.
3. I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
Friedrich Nietzsche
4. Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?
5. Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
6. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Albert Einstein
7. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of “humility.” This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
8. It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. … Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. 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.
9. If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
Gandhi
10. The most heinous and the must cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
11. I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Mark Twain
12. It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
13. A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
14. What God lacks is convictions — stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something — not try to be everything.
15. Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
16. “In God We Trust.” I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.
Thomas Jefferson
17. Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
18. We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.
Benjamin Franklin
19. The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle.
20. Lighthouses are more helpful then churches.
Voltaire
21. If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.
22. Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.
Stephen Hawking
23. Black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
24. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There’s not much personal about the laws of physics.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
25. Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
26. The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
Christopher Hitchens
27. What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
28. If you gave Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.
Sigmund Freud
29. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Karl Marx
30. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
George Bernard Shaw
31. 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.
32. Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.
Blaise Pascal
32. You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.
Richard Jeni
34. With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Delos B. McKown
35. The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
Edward Gibbon
36. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Robert Ingersoll
37. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
Huang Po
38. The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.
Benjamin Disraeli
39. Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
Unknown
40. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.
Dave Barry
41. If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.
Epicurus
42. 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?
Eric Hoffer
43. 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.
Bill Maher
44. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.
45. There’s a phrase we live by in America: “In God We Trust”. It’s right there where Jesus would want it: on our money.
Baron D’Holbach
46. If we go back to the beginning, we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
Bill Hicks
47. If I thought the Jews killed God, I’d worship the Jews.
Isaac Asimov
48. Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
José Bergamín
49. A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.
Arthur C. Clarke
50. One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
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