Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-The Buddha

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen Henry Roberts

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
-Bertrand Russell

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
-Christopher Hitchens

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
-Delos B. McKown

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
-Don Hirschberg

To say that atheism requires faith is as dim-witted as saying that disbelief in pixies or leprechauns takes faith. Even if Einstein himself told me there was an elf on my shoulder, I would still ask for proof and I wouldn’t be wrong to ask.
-Geoff Mather

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain….In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
-Richard Feynman (Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate)

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one has ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.
-Arthur C. Clarke

If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured 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 its own interests.
-Baron d’Holbach, Système de la Nature

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life.
-Leo Tolstoy

There are certain persons with a sort of rabies, who live only to infect the mass. If the young do not watch out, they will find themselves, before so very many years are past, engulfed in a howling manifestation of mob insanity, truly terrifying to think of. It will be better to be dead than to live to see it. Sanity, wholeness, is everything. In the name of piety and purity, what a mass of disgusting insanity is spoken and written. We shall have to fight the mob, in order to keep sane, and to keep society sane.
-D. H. Lawrence

It is not acceptable to have a religion where the alternative to faith is punishment — that’s how you train dogs, not develop people.
- Deng Ming-Dao

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
-Walt Whitman

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
-Mark Twain [referring to the Bible]

“Heaven help us!” said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.
-George Eliot

Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!
-Conan the Barbarian

An “ideology” is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it.
-Kenneth Burke

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.
-George Bernard Shaw

Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure.
-Ambrose Bierce

You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.
-Carl Sagan

If we are going to teach “creation science” . . . as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
-Judith Hayes

Science . . . has opened our eyes to the vastness of the universe and given us light, truth and freedom from fear where once was darkness, ignorance and superstition.
-Luther Burbank

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.
-Albert Einstein

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

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God.
-Thomas Paine

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
-Francis Bacon

Science . . . has been accused of undermining morals–but wrongly. The ethical behavior of man is better based on sympathy, education and social relationships, and requires no support from religion. Man’s plight would, indeed, be sad if he had to be kept in order through fear of punishment and hope of rewards after death.
-Albert Einstein

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men–above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, but also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.
-Albert Einstein

Thus I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity–not for a sect or a party, or for a country or a colour, but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do them good.
-Robert Owen

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
-Voltaire

The Atheist does not say “There is no God,” but he says, “I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word ‘God’ is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.”
-Charles Bradlaugh

I wouldn’t want my doctor thinking that intelligent design was an equally plausible hypothesis to evolution any more than I would want my airplane pilot believing in the flat Earth.
-James Langer

Well I don’t think we’re for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.” But I’m anticipating having a good lunch.
-James Watson

The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with any of the superstitions of the Christians religion.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
-Clarence Darrow

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
-Albert Einstein

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
-Herbert Spencer

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural – that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, of the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust.
—Robert Ingersoll

Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.
-Aristotle