"Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason."
Martin Luther
"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid
of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the
divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."
Martin Luther
"Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."
Martin Luther
"Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she
is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore;
whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and
destroyed, she and her wisdom ... Throw dung in her face to make her
ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism... She would deserve,
the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets."
Martin Luther, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148
"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample
underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees
must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."
Martin Luther
"What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the
good and for the Christian church? [...] a lie out of necessity, a useful lie,
a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."
Martin Luther
"Drive them [Jews] like mad dogs from our land... let not one of them live..."
Martin Luther
"I believe BECAUSE it's impossible."
Tertullian (b. ca. 150-160, d. ca. 220-240), one of the writers of the early Christian Church
"The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related
whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion."
Edward Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" Eusebius was a 4th century Bishop of Caesarea
and Church Historian, considered "the Father of Eclessiastical History"
"Unbelief is the greatest of sins."
Thomas Aquinas
"For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner?"
The Apostle Paul, in Romans 3:7 (KJV)
"A person is to be punished with a just penalty, who ... utters blasphemy, or gravely harms public morals,
or rails at or excites hatred of or contempt for religion or the Church."
The Catholic Church's Canon Law 1369
"Kill them all. God will select those who should go to heaven and those who should go to hell."
Abbot Arnold de Citeaux, 1205 (during the Fourth Crusade)
"Kill them all, for God knows His own."
Pope Innocent III, to his troops in the Albigensian Crusade of 1209
"God is introduced to give dignity and emphasis ... and then He is banished. It was this very atheistic
Declaration [of Independencd] which had inspired the 'higher law' doctrine of the radical antislavery men. If
the mischievous abolitionists had only followed the Bible instead of the godless Declaration, they would have been
bound to acknowledge that human bondage was divinely ordained. The mission of southerners was therefore clear;
they must defend the word of God against abolitionist infidels."
Thomas Smyth, minister of 2nd Presbyterian Church of Charleston, S.C., 11/21/1861
"Slavery itself...is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law... The purchaser [of the slave] should
carefully examine whether the slave who is put up for sale has been justly or unjustly deprived of his liberty,
and that the vendor should do nothing which might endanger the life, virtue, or Catholic faith of the slave."
Vatican statement, 1866
"I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I
maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was
equally angry with Him for creating a world."
C. S. Lewis, famous Christian apologist and former atheist
"The Myth of the Inquisition is just that: phony, made up, bogus."
Gerard V. Bradley, Notre Dame Law School Professor, in "One Cheer for the Inquisitions" on Catholic.net
"It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ."
Catholic League President Bill Donohue, about a smuggled communion wafer
"We don't have to protect the environment the Second Coming is at hand."
James Watt, Interior Secretary under Ronald Reagan
"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be
considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
President George H.W. Bush
"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."
Adolf Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941
"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews,
I am doing the Lord's work."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 65
"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry,
the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it."
Adolf Hitler, ibid.
"The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been
built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis
of national life."
Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 1933, first radio address after coming to power.
Here are pictures of Christian Nazism.
"The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance
of our society."
- Adolf Hitler, speech before the Reichstag, March 1933
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general
moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and
religion must be derived from faith ... We need believing people."
Adolf Hitler, April 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933
"The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy ...proves beyond doubt that the
Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism..."
Adolf Hitler in an article in the Vφlkischer Beobachter, February 1929
"I am personally convinced of the great power and deep significance of Christianity,
and I won't allow any other religion to be promoted."
Adolf Hitler
"As for the Jews, I am just carrying on with the same policy which the Catholic church has adopted for fifteen
hundred years, when it has regarded the Jews as dangerous and pushed them into ghettos etc., because it knew what
the Jews were like. I don't put race above religion, but I do see the danger in the representatives of this
race for Church and State, and perhaps I am doing Christianity a great service."
Adolf Hitler
"The work that Christ started but could not finish, I Adolf Hitler will conclude."
Adolf Hitler, December 1926.
Here are more of his quotes on Religion,
God, and Christianity.
"When we get through with the Jews in America, theyll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."
Catholic Father Charles Edward Coughlin, 1938
"How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God
said My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."
Rev. John Hagee
"Those who control what young people are taught, and what they experience what they see,
hear, think, and believe will determine the future course for the nation."
James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family
"Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever."
Vladimir Lenin
"Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."
Proverbs 22:6
"We believe democracy is an atheist call that idolizes human beings."
manifesto of Ansar al-Sunnah (Iraq terrorist group)
"We're in a religious war and we need to aggressively oppose secular humanism; these people are as
religiously motivated as we are and they are filled with the devil."
Timothy LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series
"With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."
Bailey Smith, Christian Coalition
"On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth."
President George W. Bush, a born-again Christian
"Faith-based organizations also need a guarantee they will not be forced to give up their right to
hire people of their own faith as the price of competing for federal money. If we
want this program to be effective and to save lives, people have got to
say interfacing with government will not cause me to lose my mission."
President George W. Bush, February 2005
"He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for a biblical worldview in everything that
I do and everywhere I am. He is training me."
Tom DeLay (R-TX), former majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives
"There are a lot of very brilliant scholars who believe the reason we have incomplete science on
evolution is that there is a higher power involved in this."
Bill O'Reilly, conservative TV and radio host
"The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished."
Sheik Abdel-Aziz ibn Baaz, Saudi Arabias supreme religious authority, 1993-1999
"The doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false,
and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture."
Congregation of the Index (of Prohibited Books),
1616, under Pope Paul V
"Communistic evolution, according to the Senate committee that examined it, is responsible for 135 million deaths
in peacetime. There's no religion that has a tiny fraction of that many deaths on its conscience. There
are scientists who will admit that there's not one iota of scientific evidence to support it."
D. James Kennedy, of Coral Ridge Ministries, "the most listened-to Presbyterian minister in the world today"
"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along,
and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it."
D. James Kennedy
"Among German historians, there's really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social
Darwinist. He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas."
Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler
"The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from
creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are
introduced to the truth of the Bible and then the question of sin and finally introduced to Jesus."
Phillip Johnson, creator of the idea of 'Intelligent' Design
"If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong,
no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them,"
Biology for Christian Schools, p. 1
"Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible."
Biology for Christian Schools
"We do not know how God created, what processes He used, for God used processes which are not now operating
anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to divine creation as special creation. We
cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by God."
Duane Gish, in Evolution, The Fossils Say No! p. 42
"If you can't trust the Bible's history, how can you trust its morality?"
Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis
"I did not know from a scientific perspective why I did not believe in evolution but I knew from a Biblical
perspective it had to be wrong or my faith was in trouble."
Ken Ham, in The Lie Evolution
"Leftist organizations are aggressively attempting to redefine America in their own Godless image."
Reverend Jerry Falwell
"We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism...we are fighting against all the systems
of Satan that are destroying our nation today...our battle is with Satan himself."
Reverend Jerry Falwell
"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates
homosexuals."
Reverend Jerry Falwell
"Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt
society could ever believe it...Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory."
Reverend Jimmy Swaggart
"The Bible is the supreme law that all governments must obey."
Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue
"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash
over you. Yes, hate is good Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty. We
are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."
Randall Terry, 8/16/1993
"Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God's law,
on the ten Commandments. No apologies."
Randall Terry
"I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like
and if you have babies, you have babies."
Randall Terry
"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you,
we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part
of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."
Randall Terry (whose son happens to be gay)
"Our goal is a Christian Nation.... We have a Biblical duty; we are called by God to conquer this
country. We don't want equal time. We don't want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy
means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules."
Randall Terry, 4/15/1993
"If Christian people work together, they can succeed during this decade in winning back control of the institutions
that have been taken from them over the past 70 years. Expect confrontations that will be not only unpleasant
but at times physically bloody. When it is over, I am convinced Gods people will emerge victorious."
Reverend Pat Robertson
"They have kept us in submission because they have talked about separation of church and state. There is no
such thing in the Constitution. It's a lie of the left, and we're not going to take it anymore."
Reverend Pat Robertson, addressing the ACLJ, 1993
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political
movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy
capitalism, and become lesbians."
Reverend Pat Robertson, fundraising letter, 1992. For more from Reverend Pat, see
here.
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
Ann Coulter, conservative author
"[Since 9/11] I am often asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders,
and convert them to Christianity. The answer is: Now more than ever!"
Ann Coulter
"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said,
'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"
Ann Coulter, on Hannity & Colmes, 6/20/2001
"But perhaps Gods purpose in the world (I am only thinking aloud here) is to draw his creatures to him. And
you have to admit that tragedies like this one at Virginia Tech help to do that!"
Dinesh DSouza
"The Church does not dictate the policies of the nation. The Church proclaims
the truth of God to which all these policies must conform."
Father Frank Provone of Priests for Life, at a prayer breakfast during the 2000 Republican convention
"If we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical explanation for man, then we lose the
validity of Christianity. Period".
G. Thomas Sharp, chairman of the Creation Truth Foundation
More Quotes from The American Taliban
"The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the
ethical and social consequences of Galileos doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just."
Paul Feyerabend, quoted in 1990 by Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005
"In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is justified in God's name, it's important to repeat that religion
can never become a vehicle of hatred, it can never be used in God's name to justify violence."
Pope Benedict XVI, 10/22/2007
"With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical
practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned
deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists."
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a 2005 dissenting opinion on McCreary County vs. ACLU of Kentucky
"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom."
Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, 12/06/2007
"I believe its a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God,
and thats what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so its in Gods standards rather than try to change
Gods standards."
Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate, 1/14/2008
Whereas dangers and threats to our Nation persist and, in this time of peril, it is appropriate that the
people of the United States, leaders and citizens alike, seek guidance, strength, and resolve through prayer
and fasting: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of
Representatives that the President should issue a proclamation
(1) designating a day for humility, prayer, and fasting for all people of the United States; and
(2) calling on all people of the United States
(A) to observe the day as a time of prayer and fasting;
(B) to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and
to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities; and
(C) to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our Nation.
H. RES. 153, 108th CONGRESS, March 27, 2003, passed by an overwhelming vote
NOTE: A similar bill in the Senate passed unanimously
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..."
from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
"... no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the
United States."
from Article VI of the U.S. Constitution
"The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
from The Treaty of Tripoli,
written during the administration of President George Washington,
signed by President John Adams and unanimously approved by the Senate in 1797.
"E Pluribus Unum" (Out of many, one)
The original national motto
"There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good
reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been
a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic
proportions if it weren't so tragic."
Richard Dawkins
"Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep
questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But
there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by
evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not."
Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden
"I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in
American life. And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless. I think
it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true."
Richard Dawkins
"My last vestige of 'hands off religion' respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001,
followed by the 'National Day of Prayer,' when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King
impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very
force that caused the problem in the first place."
Richard Dawkins, The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
"To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow,
spin-doctored sham."
Richard Dawkins, ibid.
"We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so."
Richard Dawkins, Free Inquiry, Summer, 2002
"The alternative which I favor is to renounce all euphemisms and grasp the nettle of the word atheism itself,
precisely because it is a taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to
achieve than with some non-confrontational euphemism, but if we did achieve it with the dread word atheist,
the political impact would be all the greater."
Richard Dawkins, ibid.
"I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an
explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful
place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic."
Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker p. 6
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think..."
Richard Dawkins
"Another meme of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means
blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.
The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire
Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison.
Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of
meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose
faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us
as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own
perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
"[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental
illness."
Richard Dawkins, ibid.
"It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and
it always just so happens theyre the right religion."
Richard Dawkins
"You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence
is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution."
Richard Dawkins, in Lanny Swerdlow, "My Short Interview with Richard Dawkins"
"Since all organisms inherit all their genes from their ancestors,
rather than from their ancestors' unsuccessful contemporaries, all
organisms tend to possess successful genes. They have what it takes
to become ancestors and that means to survive and reproduce. This
is why organisms tend to inherit genes with a propensity to build a
well-designed machine a body that actively works as if it is
striving to become an ancestor. That is why birds are so good at
flying, fish so good at swimming, monkeys so good at climbing,
viruses so good at spreading. That is why we love life and love sex
and love children. It is because we all, without a single exception,
inherit all of our genes from an unbroken line of successful
ancestors. The world becomes full of organisms that have what it
takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism."
Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden, page 2
"Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences,
has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the
appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning."
- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
"The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if
evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if
evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing
in the wrong direction."
Richard Dawkins
"In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls
full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time,
our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to
replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science."
Richard Dawkins
"Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant."
Richard Dawkins
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
Richard Dawkins
"Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."
Richard Dawkins
"All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them."
Richard Dawkins
"The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages
independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous."
Richard Dawkins
"Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality,
and help science to do something constructive about human suffering."
Richard Dawkins
"We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics."
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
"We are all going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because
they are never going to be born. ... The only reason we die is that we were born. Would you rather
have never been born at all?"
Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
Stephen Hawking
"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."
Stephen Hawking
"Black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice,
but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."
Stephen Hawking, NATURE, 1975
"Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and
anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth.
It is time now for reason, education and science to take over."
Madalyn Murray O'Hair - Speech, 1990
"Atheism is based upon a materialist philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but natural phenomena. There
are no supernatural forces or entities, nor can there be any. Nature simply exists."
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
"You hate me because I am the embodiment of all your doubts."
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, to Christian audiences
"An Atheist loves himself and his fellow man instead of a god. An Atheist knows that heaven is something
for which we should work now, here on earth, for all men together to enjoy."
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, 1963 statement to the Supreme Court, Murray v. Curlett
"Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason,
and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith."
Christopher Hitchens, author of god is not Great:
How Religion Poisons Everything
"Religion fosters servility and solipsism."
Christopher Hitchens
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
Christopher Hitchens
"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or
that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder
each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more
ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and
Letter to a Christian Nation
"If you believe that the Koran is the wisest book ever written, civilised society has a problem with you,
because when you read this book, it's a manifesto for religious intolerance. There are a few lines
in there that talk about the virtues of patience and charity, that is true, but in general this book is
just stocked stem to stern with a genuinely theocratic, genuinely intolerant hate of unbelievers."
Sam Harris
"I think that religion is the most dangerous and divisive ideology that we have ever produced. It is
also the only ideology that is sytematically protected from criticism, both from within and without."
Sam Harris
"Our ability to cause ourselves harm is now spreading with 21st century efficiency, and yet we are still,
to a remarkable degree, drawing our vision of how to live in this world from ancient literature. This
marriage of modern technology - destructive technology - and iron-age philosophy is a bad one."
Sam Harris
"The evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent."
Sam Harris
"There is a profound difference between having good reasons for believing something,
and simply wanting to believe it."
Sam Harris
"Religion gives people bad reasons to be good, where good reasons are actually available."
Sam Harris
"The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe
en mass what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation."
Sam Harris
"'Atheism' is really a term we do not need, in the same way that we don't have a word for someone who is not
an astrologer. All religious people are atheists with respect to everyone else's religion. We are
all atheists with respect to the thousands of dead gods that lie in that mass grave we call mythology."
Sam Harris
"There is nothing that an atheist needs to believe on insufficient evidence in order to reject the biblical god."
Sam Harris
"If ever there were an antidote to dogmatism, [atheism] is it."
Sam Harris
"Pretending to know things that you do not know is the lifeblood of religion."
Sam Harris
"The problem with fascism and communism was not that they are too critical of religion. The problem is
that they are too much like religions. These are utterly dogmatic systems of thought."
Sam Harris
"There is no society in history that has ever suffered because its population became too reasonable
too reluctant to embrace dogma, too demanding of evidence."
Sam Harris
"It is an article of faith in many religious communities that things will go spectacularly wrong, and
that this is a good thing."
Sam Harris
"Much of the Bible or the Quran is just life-destroying gibberish, and we just have to acknowledge this and
cease to take these books seriously."
Sam Harris
"There's an all-purpose corrective here, which is just intellectual honesty. If you cease to pretend to be
certain about things that you are not certain about, see where that gets you."
Sam Harris
"One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be appreciated is the frequency with which people of
faith praise themselves for their humility while condemning scientists and other non-believers for
their intellectual arrogance. There is, in fact, no worldview more
reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: 'the
creator of the universe takes an interest in me, loves me, and will
reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will
remain as the best statement of the truth until the end of the world;
everyone who disagrees with me will spend an eternity in hell....' An
average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average
Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in
scientific discourse and there have been some extremely arrogant scientists."
Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, pp 74-75
"We experience happiness and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize that they experience
happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover that 'love' is largely a matter of wishing that others experience
happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own
and that of others, than hate. There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy;
the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the
happiness of others. We discover that we can be selfish together."
Sam Harris, The End of Faith, pp.186-187
"If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you
like.
But on the other hand, if somebody says, 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday,' you
say, 'Fine, I respect that.'"
Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"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
"God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become
something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining."
Douglas Adams
"If one has belief, knowledge is lacking. If one has knowledge, belief is unnecessary."
David Eller, Atheism Advanced
"Religion is not so bad, unless you believe it."
David Eller, ibid.
"In the absence of evidence, the scientist says, 'I don't know,' but the religionist says, 'I believe.'"
David Eller, ibid.
"One does not have to prove a negative. One should assume a negative."
David Eller, ibid.
"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
"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."
George Bernard Shaw, from "Major Barbara"
"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 (ca. 341-270 BCE) Greek philosopher
Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can and does not want to.
If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent.
If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked.
If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?
Epicurus
"Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not.
Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?"
Epicurus
"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."
Euripides (ca. 480-406 BCE) Greek poet, playwright and philospher
"If the gods do evil then they are not gods."
Euripides
"Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?"
Plato (ca. 424348 BCE) Greek philosopher,
in the Euthyphro dilemma
"A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods."
Plato
"For though a man should be a complete unbeliever in the being of gods; if he also has a native uprightness
of temper, such persons will detest evil in men; their repugnance to wrong disinclines them
to commit wrongful acts; they shun the unrighteous and are drawn to the upright."
Plato, acknowledging that Atheists can lead an honest life, in Against the Faith (1985), by Jim Herrick
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion,
however satisfying and reassuring."
Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
"If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?"
Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. 257
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary
propensity toward fanaticism."
Carl Sagan
"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me
will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions
that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking...there is no reason to
deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence."
Carl Sagan, "Parade Magazine," March 1996
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
David Hume & Carl Sagan
"Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong... As soon as you do that,
you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from..."
Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1981)
"Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially
adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning."
Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine
"The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea)."
Michael Shermer
"There is no room in science for the arbitrary meddling of an unknown force or being that intervenes who-knows-when
to do who-knows-what for who-knows-why and who-knows-how. Thats not science; thats just magic."
Austin Cline
"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 egotisms."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born American theoretical physicist,
quoted in The New York Times obituary, April 19, 1955
"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, 1954, from The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman
"I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for
which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him."
Albert Einstein, letter to Edgar Meyer, 1/2/1915
"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist."
Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, 7/2/1945
"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one."
Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, 9/28/1949
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a
collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."
Albert Einstein, letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, 1/3/1954
"For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions."
Albert Einstein, ibid.
"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; 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."
Albert Einstein, Religion and Science, 11/9/1930
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."
Albert Einstein
"During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution, human fantasy created gods in man's own image who, by
the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate influence, the phenomenal world... The
idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old conception of the gods."
Albert Einstein
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path
to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith,
but through striving after rational knowledge."
Albert Einstein
"The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its
thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them."
Albert Einstein
"Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions,
the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning."
Albert Einstein
"True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."
Albert Einstein
"Intellectual honesty is a skill that has to be learned and a virtue that has to be practiced;
it often requires you to accept unpleasant conclusions."
John B. Hodges
"If faith is 'believing what you are told', religious ethics is 'doing what you are told'."
John B. Hodges
"Religion is for people who have never matured in their understanding of ethics. Religion
teaches a child's view of ethics, that 'being good' means 'obeying your parent.' It gives a
moral blank check to those bold enough, dishonest enough, to claim to speak for God. Atheism
means looking at ethical questions as an adult among other adults, considering ethics as a means of
maintaining peace and cooperation among equals, so that all may pursue happiness within the
limits that ethics defines."
John B. Hodges
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."
John Stuart Mill
"Most true believers, when faced with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, will hold on to
those beliefs even more strongly."
Mark Thomas, president and co-founder of Atheists of Silicon Valley
"True believers are continually shown by reality that their god doesn't exist, but have developed
extensive coping mechanisms to deal with this cognitive dissonance."
Mark Thomas
"Fundamentalists of different religions have more in common with each other than they do with the
moderates of their own religions."
Mark Thomas
"Christians and Jews don't believe in Allah or Brahma. Hindus don't believe in Yahweh or
Allah. Muslims don't believe in Brahma or Yahweh. Atheists agree with all of them."
Mark Thomas
"The world looks like it was designed. Of course, the Sun also looks like it goes around the Earth. It
is only thru science that we know that both of these perceptions are wrong."
Mark Thomas
"There is little difference in the knowledge held by those who can't learn and those who won't."
Mark Thomas
"We all behave as though what we think is true, is true."
Mark Thomas
"The essence of Christianity, as I see it, is love. The essence of Humanism
(and I'm also a Humanist) is love. At that level, we're not far apart."
Mark Thomas
"Atheism is nothing more than a conclusion. There are plenty of people in this world who are
Atheists, but this doesn't mean we share values. Communism is a perfect example. Communism
is for all practical purposes, a political religion: It is totalitarian, it venerates its sainted founders,
it has sacred dogma that cannot be challenged; it persecutes its heretics, it does not brook disobedience,
it feels no compunction against twisting science for its own means. Even its touted "Atheism" is
simply a defensive reaction against its rival religions. It has nothing in common with the free
thought of Paine or Jefferson, or the humanism of Dawkins or Einstein."
David Fitzgerald
"I'm a strong atheist. I believe that gods are by definition supernatural beings,
that the supernatural by definition violates natural law, violating natural law is by
definition impossible, and impossible things by definition can't exist."
James Huber
"Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told. Religion is doing
what you are told no matter what is right."
Larry Mundinger, 1999
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those
who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin
"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, in Life & Letters
"I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language
of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and
almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And that is a damnable doctrine."
Charles Darwin
"That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result
of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees
well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection."
Charles Darwin
"It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly
any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of mens minds which
follow[s] from the advance of science."
Charles Darwin, 1880
"Science is advanced by proposing and testing hypothesis, not by declaring questions unsolvable."
N. J. Matzke
"Who knows most, doubts most."
Robert Browning
"There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them."
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)
"If there is a supreme being, he's crazy."
Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)
"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself."
Peter OToole
"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind."
Marquis de Sade
"Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests onself in its challenges or huddles in the
valleys in a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of an illusory
security and safety."
Saul Arinsky
"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."
Thomas Paine
"The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing;
it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities;
it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion."
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794)
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church,
by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any
church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."
Thomas Paine, ibid.
"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful
to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving;
it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is
impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that
mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and
prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional
belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the
commission of every other crime."
Thomas Paine, ibid.
"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have
never used any other, and I trust I never shall."
Thomas Paine, ibid.
"Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never
seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been
told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie."
Thomas Paine, ibid.
"Reasoning with one who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to a dead man."
Thomas Paine
"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited
to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity."
Thomas Paine
"I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion
upon religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always
strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different
that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave
of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it."
Thomas Paine
"I detest the Bible as I detest everything that is cruel."
Thomas Paine
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous
executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled,
it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God.
It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind."
Thomas Paine
"What is it the Bible teaches us? raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament
teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married,
and the belief of this debauchery is called faith."
Thomas Paine
"And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathising and benevolent
in the heart of man."
Thomas Paine
"The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank
hypocrisy. When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what
they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and
being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others."
Thomas Paine
"The Age of Reason was responsible for making more people into infidels than any other
book except the Bible."
Gordon Stein
"With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter,
nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."
William Lloyd Garrison (1805 - 1879) Life Vol. i. p. 188
"When an honest but mistaken man learns of his error, he either [forthrightly] ceases to be mistaken, or ceases to be honest." Peter E. Hendrickson
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
Napoleon Bonaparte
"Religion is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance."
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
"Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to
reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors."
Robert Owen, reformer and philanthropist
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others."
Thomas Jefferson, in his Statute for Religious Freedom, saying government has no authority over
one's religious opinions, thus defining "crime" as the injury of a person or his property
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
Thomas Jefferson
"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks
my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
"Religions are all alike founded upon fables and mythologies."
Thomas Jefferson
"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."
Thomas Jefferson
"In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty."
Thomas Jefferson
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
"Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs."
Thomas Jefferson, when asked to issue an official prayer proclamation
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than
he who believes what is wrong."
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in
religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for
myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789
"Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous,
and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind."
Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822
"It is between fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then considered it merely
the ravings of a maniac."
Thomas Jefferson
"The Christian God is a being of terrific character cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust."
Thomas Jefferson
"Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness
even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded
fear. ... Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it end in a belief
that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and
in the love of others which it will procure for you"
Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson's Works, Vol. II, p. 217
"Shake off all the 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 ...
Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a
belief that there is no God, you will find inducements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness
you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you."
Thomas Jefferson, letter (written from Paris) to nephew Peter Carr, 1787
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin,
will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 1823
"The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain
to attempt minute enquiry into it; and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the
texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right,from that cause, to entertain much
doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts
of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very
inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams (January 24, 1814)
"I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives
But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They
must have a positive, a declared assent to all of their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would
never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Mrs. M. Harrison Smith, 1816
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free
civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political
as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Alexander Humboldt, 1813
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity,
have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards
uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools
and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the world."
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787
"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular
superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Dr. Woods
"The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and
adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to
themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ."
Thomas Jefferson
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
Thomas Jefferson
"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the
world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions
unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."
Thomas Jefferson
You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, 6/25/1819
"As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines
of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, 10/31/1819
"Let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance
under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if
we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of
as bitter and bloody persecutions. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be
trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the
government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to
govern him? Let history answer this question."
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address
"To talk of immaterial existences, is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God are immaterial
is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: ... I
believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by [John] Locke."
Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 15, 1820
"Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for
his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate
with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should
"make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building
a wall of separation between Church and State."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd U.S. President (1801-1809), letter to Danbury Baptists, 1802
"Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons
of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an
established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption
within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is
absolutely essential in a free society."
Thomas Jefferson
Note: Here are more Thomas Jefferson quotes on religion.
"The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of clergy."
George Washington, 1st U.S. President
"Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which
spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the
Christians so that their [NOT our!] religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society."
George Washington, letter to Sir Edward Newenham, 6/22/1792
" ... happily the government of the United States ... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. ... Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."
President George Washington, in a 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), from the Historical Review of Pennsylvania, which warns,
among other things, that if we don't use the Liberty to hold and express our own religious
opinions, even if out of the fear of reprisal, then we rightly forfeit that Liberty
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
Benjamin Franklin
"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies."
Benjamin Franklin, Toward The Mystery
"Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets,
according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself."
Benjamin Franklin, (Franklin's Autobiography, 181718)
"Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands
they produced an effect precisely the reverse to what was
intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted,
appeared to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself; in a word, I soon became a thorough Deist."
Benjamin Franklin, (ibid.)
"The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason."
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1758
"Revealed religion has no weight with me."
Benjamin Franklin
"Indeed, when religious people quarrel about religion, or hungry people quarrel about victuals,
it looks as if they had not much of either among them."
Benjamin Franklin, quoted by Joseph Lewis in Benjamin Franklin - Freethinker
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself,
and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the
civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
Benjamin Franklin, letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1790
"Do not, however, mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his
honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that brought upon him the character of a heretic."
Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, in Works, Vol. X, p.365
"The things of this world take up too much of my time, of which indeed I
have too little left, to undertake anything like a reformation in religion."
Benjamin Franklin, Works, Vol. X', p. 323
"Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality,
serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another."
Benjamin Franklin
"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his
Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England,
some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think
it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble."
Benjamin Franklin, A Biography in his Own Words edited by Thomas Fleming, p. 404
"It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good character and great influence should have been an
unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers."
Priestley's Benjamin Franklin Biography, p. 60
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere
in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines,
and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."
John 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, letter to Thomas Jefferson
"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the
most bloody religion that ever existed?"
John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of
the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved the Cross.
Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
"What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era?
Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius?
Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by
order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'index
expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine."
John Adams, letter to John Taylor
"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. And
ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting
sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate,
the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently
endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth
in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof,
and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm
about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes."
John Adams, letter to John Taylor
"This is my religion ... joy and exaltation in my own existence ... so
go ahead and snarl ... bite ... howl, you Calvinistic divines and all
you who say I am no Christian. I say you are not Christian."
John Adams, Toward the Mystery
"[In regard to the Trinity]; "Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses,
and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us
that three was one ... and one equals three, you and I would never
have believed it. We would never fall victims to such lies."
John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
"Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient
Christianism, which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christian factions, above
all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public? Miracles
after miracles have rolled down in torrents, wave succeeding wave in the
Catholic church, from the Council of Nicea, and long before, to this day."
John Adams, to Jefferson, 3 December 1813
"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of
governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now
sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture,
hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their
history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is
at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may
hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any
persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any
degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or
houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that
these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses...."
John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the
United States of America; from Adrienne Koch, ed.,
The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment
and a Free Society, p. 258
"Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion."
John Adams
"The United States of America governments have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments
erected on the simple principles of nature. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in
that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more
than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever
be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
John Adams
"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in pursuit of
phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principal behind lotteries, dating and religion."
Scott Adams, creator of "Dilbert"
"Have courage to use your own reason! - that is the motto of enlightenment."
Emmanuel Kant
"Rational arguments do not work on religious people, otherwise there would be no religious people."
Hugh Lauries character Dr. House, on the TV show "House"
"Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst."
C.S. Lewis, noted Christian author
"Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900)
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"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, The Antichrist
"There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit
from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."
Chapman Cohen
"All of science is built on territory once occupied by gods. Is there some boundary at which
science is supposed to stop?"
Bob Parks, University of Maryland
"There is no god higher than truth."
Mahatma Ghandi
"Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen."
Michel de Montaigne
"Religion is all bunk."
Thomas Edison
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell,
of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
Thomas Edison
"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, in the "New York Times," 1910
"Ethical people will do what is right, no matter what they are told. Religious people will do what
they are told, no matter what is right."
unknown
"There is but one evil, ignorance."
Socrates
"The world holds two classes of men intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."
Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri, 973-1057 CE, Syrian poet
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
Galileo
"All my life I have made it a rule never to permit a religious man or woman take for granted that his or her
religious beliefs deserved more consideration than non-religious beliefs or anti-religious ones. I never
agree with that foolish statement that I ought to respect the views of others when I believe them to be wrong."
Chapman Cohen, The Creedo of Empowerment
"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
W. K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief, An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism
"If you can tell me what to think, then I can tell you where to go."
Unknown
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into."
Jonathan Swift, author/theologian
"Those who get instructions directly from the Almighty are twice blessed. They get their orders from
the Highest Authority, and the orders are always to do what they would have done anyway."
Harley Sorensen, SF Gate
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government."
Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
"In contradiction to the Bible, the First Amendment to our Constitution gives us
the right to worship gods (or not), work on Sunday (or not), and say what we wish
about the various gods. The Constitution, conceived by what may be the most
brilliant and visionary group of men ever assembled, must take precedence over a
book compiled by self-serving peoples of ancient cultures."
David Miles, Orange Beach, AL
"ATHEIST is really a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term; it admits of no paltering and of no evasion,
and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech."
Chapman Cohen
"I have the honesty to say Im an Atheist. There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God."
Ernst Mayr, Harvard University, one of the most influential biologists in history
"On the other hand, famous evolutionists such as Dobzhansky were firm believers in a
personal God. He would work as a scientist all week and then on Sunday get down on
his knees and pray to God. Frankly Ive never been able to understand it because you
would need two totally different compartments in your brain, one that deals with
religion and the other with everything else."
Ernst Mayr
"Evolution ... is opportunistic, hence unpredictable."
Ernst Mayr
"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears."
Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
"The very fears and guilts imposed by religious training are responsible for some of history's most brutal wars,
crusades, pogroms, and persecutions, including five centuries of almost unimaginable terrorism under Europe's
Inquisition and the unthinkably sadistic legal murder of nearly nine million women. History doesn't say
much very good about God."
Barbara G. Walker, The Skeptical Feminist
"Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion."
Lemuel Washburn
"What a queer thing is Christian salvation! Believing in firemen will not save a burning house;
believing in doctors will not make one well, but believing in a savior saves men. Fudge!"
Lemuel Washburn
"When religion comes in at the door, common sense goes out at the window."
Lemuel Washburn
"There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermingle with religion. Its least
interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation."
James Madison, Founding Father and author of the First Amendment, 1788
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial.
What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy;
ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
James Madison - chief architect of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
"Who does not see that the same authority, which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions,
may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?"
James Madison (1751-1836) 4th U.S. President (1809-1817) "A Memorial and Remonstrance Against
Religious Assessments," addressed to the Virginia General Assemby, 1785
"It degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the
Legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it
only in degree."
James Madison
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
James Madison, letter to William Bradford, 1771
"Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution
of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated
by precedents already furnished in their short history."
James Madison, undated, Detached Memoranda
"The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of ... constitutional principles."
James Madison, ibid.
"When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other passions is increased by the
sympathy of a multitude. But enthusiasm is only a temporary state of Religion, and whilst it lasts
will hardly be seen with pleasure at the helm. Even in its coolest state, it has been much oftener a
motive to oppression than a restraint from it."
James Madison
"A zeal for different opinions concerning religion...[has] divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with
mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for
their common good."
James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Paper No. 10
"The settled opinion here is that religion is essentially distinct from Civil Govt. and exempt from its cognizance;
that a connection between them is injurious to both
."
James Madison, 1823
"When tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign foe."
James Madison
"One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural."
James D. Watson, Nobel laureate, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA
"It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we CAN imagine."
J.B.S. Haldane
"Religion makes good people better and bad people worse."
Christian theologian H. Richard Niebuhr
"One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be
religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this
accomplishment."
Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate physicist, A Designer Universe?
"On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful."
Steven Weinberg, ibid.
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
Steven Weinberg
"If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words,
and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature."
Steven Weinberg
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it 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."
Steven Weinberg, in Freethought Today, April, 2000
"I think enormous harm is done by religion not just in the name of religion, but actually by religion. ... Many
people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein
may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham
being willing to sacrifice Issac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible
thing."
Steven Weinberg. The Atheism Tapes
"[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too."
Steven Weinberg, ibid.
Steven Weinberg also points to the self-righteous true believers who killed Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as to those Christians and Muslims who have used religion to defend slavery.
"There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism."
Daniel Dennett, Darwins Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
"Wherever science has not yet cast its illuminating light, the supernatural or metaphysical can
and will always be unwrapped by some of us, to provide an explanation."
Ronald Jenner, Postdoctoral Researcher, Marie Curie Fellow
"Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology. Intelligent design is not a scientific concept."
John H. Marburger III, Director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy,
in The New York Times, August 3, 2005
"We believe that intelligent design is neither sound science nor good theology."
The International Society for Science and Religion
"There is absolutely no scientific basis or evidence for 'intelligent design.' It is
simply a religious assertion, and it has no place in a science course."
biologist David Hillis of the University of Texas
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to
safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
H.L. Mencken
"All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only
the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent
of God exactly and completely."
H.L. Mencken
"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind that its modest and greatly overestimated
services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking."
H.L. Mencken
"The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live
is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected."
H.L. Mencken (American Mercury, March 1930)
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."
H.L. Mencken (The New York Times Magazine, 9/11/1955
"The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore."
H.L. Mencken (Minority Report, 1956)
"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in
His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters."
H.L. Mencken
Mencken's Creed
"People who oppose evolution, and seek to have creationism or intelligent design included in science
curricula, seek to dismiss and change the most successful way of knowing ever discovered. They wish
to substitute opinion and belief for evidence and testing. The proponents of creationism/intelligent
design promote scientific ignorance in the guise of learning. As professional scientists and
educators, we strongly assert that such efforts are both misguided and flawed, presenting an
incorrect view of science, its understandings, and its processes."
Botanical Society of America
"Evolution and cosmology represent two of the unifying concepts of modern science. There are few
scientific theories more firmly supported by observations than these ... We do our children a grave
disservice if we remove from their education an exposure to firm scientific evidence supporting principles
that significantly shape our understanding of the world in which we live."
American Association of Physics Teachers
"Evolution is one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science."
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
"Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution paths that a sensible God would never
tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce."
Stephen J. Gould
"[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science."
Stephen J. Gould
"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human
arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."
Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory
"To teach kids that creationism explains something about the world is no different than teaching them that
the earth is flat."
Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life at Boston College
"The breathtaking inanity of the [school] Boards decision is evident when considered against the factual
backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial."
Judge John Jones III, Bush appointed US District Court Judge, in his final conclusion in the Dover Trial, 12/20/2005
"There is no other door to knowledge than the door Nature opens. And there is no truth but the truth
we discover in Nature."
Luther Burbank (1849-1926) Horticulturist
"Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity,
electricity and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also, should introduce a clause to prevent
the use of the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope or any other instrument of precision
which may in the future be invented, constructed or used for the discovery of truth."
Luther Burbank
"Evolution lies at the heart of biology. It is seamlessly and continuously linked to health research to
better understand such conditions as AIDS or bird flu or Parkinson's or cancer or heart disease. Every
biomedical experiment, every tiny advance, every major breakthrough ultimately connects to the principles
first postulated by Darwin."
Huntington F. Willard of Duke University, author of the textbook Genetics in Medicine,
Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy
"Evolutionary biology is no more an atheistic theory than is nuclear physics, relativity theory, or astronomy."
Peter Olofsson, PhD.
"There is nothing wrong with challenging conventional wisdom continuing challenge is a core
feature of science. But challengers should at least be aware of, read, cite, and specifically
rebut the actual data that supports conventional wisdom, not merely construct a rhetorical
edifice out of omission of relevant facts, selective quoting, bad analogies, knocking down
strawmen, and tendentious interpretations. Unless and until the 'intelligent design' movement
does this, they are not seriously in the game. They're not even playing the same sport."
The Panda's Thumb
"The Bible identifies 15 crimes against the family worthy of the death penalty.
ABORTION is treason against the family and deserves the DEATH PENALTY.
ADULTERY is treason to the family; adulterers should be put to DEATH.
HOMOSEXUALTIY is treason to the family, and it too, is worthy of DEATH."
R.J. Rushdoony, to Bill Moyers on television. From a PBS Home Video: God and Politics:
On Earth as it is in Heaven, 1988
R.J. Rushdoony hasn't read his bible much. God doesn't oppose abortion and he doesn't seem to mind child abuse. See Numbers 31:2-17, Deuteronomy 2:34, Deuteronomy 3:3-6, Joshua 5:21, 1 Samuel 15:3, etc.
Concerning adultery, many of the bible's heroes committed it with God's blessing: Genesis 38:8-10, Hosea 1:2, 2 Samuel 11:4 (David was punished for this one but not the death penalty as Rushdoony suggested), to list a few.
But concerning the death penalty, there's the following problem: Genesis 9:6 "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God has God made man." Sounds like a bit of a contradiction with all those OT laws.
"God himself shows little respect for what is best in the Bible. He commands 'Thou shalt not kill',
and then promptly orders the killing of many thousands. Moses condemns human sacrifice but God
demands the sacrifice of Isaac and accepts that of Jephthah's daughter. Jesus preaches 'whoever
shall say 'you fool!', shall be in danger of hell fire', but shortly after this rages at the
pharisees saying 'you fools!'."
Prof Carl Lofmark, What is the Bible?
"The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, god makes no more
sense than unie; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd."
George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
"The belief in eternal torment, still subscribed to by fundamentalist Christian denominations,
undoubtedly ranks as the most vicious and reprehensible doctrine of classical Christianity.
It has resulted in an incalculable amount of psychological torture, especially among children
where it is employed as a terror tactic to prompt obedience."
George H. Smith, ibid.
"It cannot be emphasised too strongly that Christianity has a vested interest in human misery.
Christianity, perhaps more than any religion before or since, capitalized on human suffering; and it
was enormously successful in insuring its own existence through the perpetuation of human suffering."
George H. Smith, ibid.
"Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness
before it can introduce salvation."
George H. Smith, ibid.
"Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason
be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded which leaves one in the
position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument."
George H. Smith, ibid.
"I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alleged method of acquiring knowledge, is totally invalid and as a
consequence, all propositions of faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason."
George H. Smith, ibid.
"All religions are sick men's dreams, false demonstrably false and pernicious."
Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim
"Far from being an aberration that is not representative of Christianity, the persecution of heretics follows
logically from the connection of faith and salvation as presented by Jesus in the Gospels."
Shadia B. Drury, Why Biblical Religions
Are an Obstacle to Freedom
"And so the violence continued century after century, fired by a Spirit which gloated with vindictive piety over
the suffering of burning heretics on earth with superhuman malice upon their imagined suffering beyond the grave."
Mark Mason, The Christian Holocaust
"The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of
human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and in practice."
Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, 1871
"If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist."
Mikhail Bakunin, ibid., p. 25
"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
"If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that
'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same
criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal
significance."
A.J. Ayer
"One might be asked 'How can you prove that a god does not exist?' One can only reply
that it is scarcely necessary to disprove what has never been proved."
David A. Spitz (1916-1975)
"Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin."
Thomas Henry Huxley, M.D., Essays on Controversial Questions, 1889
"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,
quite intelligent enough."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
"I call him free who is led solely by reason."
Baruch Spinoza
"Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers,
and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and
proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these
men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means
by which their authority is preserved."
- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
"Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety."
Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670)
"It is among men of genius and science that atheism alone is found."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Refutation of Deism, 1814
"Christianity indeed has equaled Judaism in the atrocities, and exceeded it in the extent of its
desolation. Eleven millions of men, women, and children have been killed in battle, butchered
in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated,
and pillaged in the spirit of the Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, ibid.
"If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism, 1811
"Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!"
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, 1813
"The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is
frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact."
Sir Leslie Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking
"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand
things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but
it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless."
Leo Tolstoy
"Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by
force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom."
Vladimir Lenin
"The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart
of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences
of the human heart."
Walter Lippman
"What I conclude is that religion has nothing to do with experience or reason but with deep and irrational needs."
Richard Taylor, "Will Secularism Survive?", Free Inquiry
"He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not, is a slave."
William Drummond
"Jesus, in fact, was typical of a certain kind of fanatical young idealist: at one moment
holding forth with tears in his eyes about the need for universal love; at the next,
furiously denouncing the morons, crooks and bigots who do not see eye to eye with him.
It is very natural and very human behaviour. But it is not supernatural. Many of the
great men in history (for example Socrates and Gandhi) have met criticism with more
dignity and restraint."
Margaret Knight, Lecturer on Psychology, Aberdeen University
"This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and
misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the
history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus."
Margaret Knight
"There is no justification for the common claim that Christianity was responsible for the
abolition of slavery. The Negro slave trade a far more infamous practice than slavery in the
ancient world was initiated, carried on and defended by Christian men in Christian countries."
Margaret Knight
"The dominant Catholic Church jumped through legalistic hoops to make slavery not only acceptable
but justifiable as a way of spreading the faith. Indeed, slave owners were obliged by law to
baptise their slaves."
Phil Grabsky, writer An Inconvenient History, BBC
"It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilisation that the longest
period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of
Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith
had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe."
H.A.L. Fisher, History of Europe
"Let's not forget that the first holocaust took place not in the concentration
camps of Nazi Germany, or Poland, but on the cotton fields of Christian America,
the gold mines of Catholic Brazil, and the sugar plantations of the Carribbean.
One and a half million negroes died in transit from their homeland. We don't
know how many were worked, whipped, tortured, hanged or beaten to death but
the ultimate toll was considerably greater than the combined toll in Auswitz,
Belsen and the like. We're talking about the Christian holocaust."
OzHeretic Prepare Slaughter
"These attempts to turn courthouses into pulpits will continue to be challenged
with facts and defeated with reason."
David Condo, Maryland State Director for American Atheists
"The test of a good religion is whether you can joke about it."
G. K. Chesterson
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him; let us worship God
through Jesus if we must if ignorance has so far prevailed that this name
can still be spoken in all seriousness without being taken as a synonym for
rapine and carnage. Every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the
Christian sect in horror..."
Voltaire
"Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool."
Voltaire
"You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored
the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason."
Voltaire
"He who is involved in ecstacies and visions, who takes dreams for reality, and his own imagination for prophesy, is a
fanatical novice of great hope and promise, and will soon advance to the higher stage and kill men for the love of God."
Voltaire
"The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning."
Voltaire
"The Bible. That is what fools have written, what imbeciles commend, what rogues teach and
young children are made to learn by heart."
Voltaire
"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world."
Voltaire, in a letter to Frederick the Great
"A great error is more easily propagated, than a great truth, because it is easier to believe, than to reason,
and because people prefer the marvels of romances to the simplicity of history."
Charles Franηois Dupuis, 1794
"If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible
people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him."
Samuel Butler
"The quest for God is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there."
Anon.
Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there.
Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there and shouting "I found it!"
Anon.
"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."
Anon.
"If you are comfortable with a lie, you will never look for the truth."
Anon.
"[T]he Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected
by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.
This conclusion derives support ... from recognition of the fact that the political interest
in forestalling intolerance extends beyond intolerance among Christian sects or even intolerance
among 'religions' to encompass intolerance of the disbeliever and the uncertain."
Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (6/04/1985) at 52-54, taken from Newdow vs. Congress (9th Circuit #00-16423)
"To remain silent when one should protest makes cowards out of men."
Abraham Lincoln
"The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could
never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma."
Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to a friend
"I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense.
But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the
papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians,
and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle
my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity."
Abraham Lincoln
"I see a very dark cloud on America's horizon, and that cloud is coming from Rome."
Abraham Lincoln
"Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."
Abraham Lincoln, Letters to Thurlow Weed, March 14, 1865
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time,
but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
Abraham Lincoln
"It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity."
Abraham Lincoln, from What Great Men Think Of Religion by Ira Cardiff
"My husband is not a Christian but is a religious man, I think."
Mary Todd Lincoln, Lincoln's wife, in Toward The Mystery
"Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand,
but the passages that bother me are those I do understand."
Mark Twain
"Man is a marvelous curiosity... he thinks he is the Creator's pet... he even believes the Creator loves him;
has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of
trouble. He prays to Him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea."
Mark Twain
"I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be
religious unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force."
Mark Twain
"When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know."
Mark Twain
"Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy;
if He is as little as that, He is beneath it."
Mark Twain
"If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean,
it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him."
Mark Twain
"To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master."
Mark Twain
"In God We Trust. It is the choicest compliment that has ever been paid us, and the
most gratifying to our feelings. It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always
sounds well In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true."
Mark Twain
"If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be a Christian."
Mark Twain
"The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in
spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and
discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in
childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against
Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and
superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred
years before Christian religion was born."
Mark Twain
"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as
it is in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree it
is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime the invention
of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow
as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours
is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it
has spilt."
Mark Twain
"Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine,
it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery."
Mark Twain
"The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea
to reform itself a little, by way of example."
Mark Twain
"The bible has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history;
and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies."
Mark Twain
"I have never let schooling interfere with my education."
Mark Twain
"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of."
Mark Twain
"The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it."
Mark Twain
"Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
Mark Twain
"Ignorance is not not knowin' Ignorance is knowin' what ain't so."
Mark Twain
"I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverant, except toward the things
which were sacred to other people"
Mark Twain
"We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of
sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and
defile the things which are holy to us."
Mark Twain, Following the Equator
"Strange a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and
has none Himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to
shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon Himself;
and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship Him!"
Mark Twain
"Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible,
I am left with atheism. I can live with that."
Mark Twain
"I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit."
Mark Twain
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent it says so right here on the label. If you have a
mind capable of believing all three of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for
you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills."
Robert Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long,
Here are more Heinlein quotes.
"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its
creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so."
Robert A. Heinlein
"Men rarely (if ever) dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners
and morals of a spoiled child."
Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion
is a crutch for people."
Robert Heinlein, ibid.
"We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is
evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth
is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution
of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions."
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
"When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to
decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two
theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but
mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force."
Bertrand Russell
"My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of
traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they
were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to
work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity."
Bertrand Russell, from an unpublished essay, "Is There a God?" (1952)
"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
Bertrand Russell
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
Bertrand Russell
"You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement
in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored
races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently
opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as
organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian, 1927
"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
Bertrand Russell
"The term 'skeptic' does not mean one who doubts, but one who investigates or researches, as opposed to one who
asserts and thinks that he has found."
Miguel De Unamuno, distinguished Spanish poet, essayist, novelist, playwright (1864-1936)
"My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live."
Miguel De Unamuno
"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, heretic, or an unbeliever."
Daniel Boorstin
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
"An immoral god a hangover from stone age minds still corrupts human mentality with its scapegoat
justice and the threat of eternal damnation."
Reverend Reginald Howard Bass, The History of Natural Religion
"The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness."
Martin Esslin
"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of
heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite
like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny...
George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952), Little Essays, No. 107, "Christian Morality"
"Fear first created the gods."
George Santayana
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Phillip K. Dick
"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend
to know where many ignorant men are sure that is all that agnosticism means."
Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, 1925
"In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to
support the belief in God and in personal immortality."
Clarence Darrow, The Sign, 1938
"We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn't been for the church dragging science back by its coattails
and burning our best minds at the stake."
Catherine Fahringer
"Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity."
Barbara G. Walker
"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 Roberts
"The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This
may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization."
Robert A. Wilson (1932- )
Mosaic Law orders us to kill anyone who worships a different god, kill anyone who worships idols, kill anyone who blasphemes, kill anyone who works on Saturday, kill anyone who dishonors their parents, kill anyone who commits adultery, kill any woman who has sex before marriage, kill anyone who steals a slave, kill anyone who has homosexual sex, and wage genocidal war against any city that allows religious liberty (see Deuteronomy 13).
"In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased;
but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue."
Ethan Allen (1738-1789) American Revolutionary, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784)
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less
apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the
other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."
Aristotle (ca. 384-322 BCE) Greek philosopher, from 2000 Years of Disbelief, James A. Haught, ed.
"Men create the gods after their own images."
Aristotle
"Religions are like glow-worms. They need darkness in order to shine."
Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher
"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. If ignorance of Nature gave birth to gods,
then knowledge of Nature is calculated to destroy them"
Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) System of Nature
"All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, ferocity;
and modern religions are only ancient follies."
Baron D'Holbach
"Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument."
Samuel Johnson
"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument."
William G. McAdoo
"Most religious people would rather be certain than right."
Leonard Tramiel
"Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable
arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing."
Sigmund Freud
"Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did
not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the
idea of a godless, purposeless life."
Sigmund Freud
"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis."
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927)
"The world is divided into armed camps, ready to commit genocide just because we can not agree on which
fairy tales to believe. In the end, religion will kill us all."
Ed Kerbs
"A prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support."
Ambrose Bierce
"The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will
cease to be free for religion except for the sect that can win political power."
Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954) Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court (1941-1954)
dissenting opinion, Zorach v. Clauson, 4/28/1952
"The mixing of government and religion can be a threat to free
government, even if no one is forced to participate.... When the
government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion, it conveys a
message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored
beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all
persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some."
Harry Andrew Blackmun, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Lee v. Weisman, 1992
"No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions,
whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion."
Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 1947
"Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious
organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of
religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and state.'"
Hugo L. Black, ibid.
"Religious beliefs worthy of respect are the product of free and voluntary choice by the
faithful. Government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion."
Paul Stevens, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1985
"The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world
as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that
if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the
State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of
inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people."
Anthony M. Kennedy (b. 1936) Supreme Court Justice, appointed by Reagan and confirmed 97-0, for the majority,
Lee v. Weisman (1992), dismissing as unacceptable the cruel idea that a student should forfeit her own
graduation in order to avoid commencement prayers and invocations, quoted from
"The Case Against School Prayer," a Freedom From Religion Foundation pamphlet
"The Ten Commandments are undeniably a sacred text in the Jewish and
Christian faiths, and no legislative recitation of a supposed secular
purpose can blind us to that fact ... the first part of the
Commandments concerns the religious duties of believers: worshipping
the Lord God alone, avoiding idolatry, not using the Lord's name in
vain, and observing the Sabbath day."
The U.S. Supreme Court, Stone v. Graham, 1980
"(W)e do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other
of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."
William H. Taft, 27th U.S. President (1909-1913), 10th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1921-1930),
letter to Yale University, on turning down an offer for its
presidency, in Breaking the Last Taboo (1996), from James A. Haught
"Americans practice different faiths in churches, synagogues, mosques
and temples. And many good people practice no faith at all."
George W. Bush, 43rd U.S. President, Easter Address of 2002
"We have the most religious freedom of any country in the world, including the freedom not to believe."
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton, 42nd U.S. President
"We cannot permit any inquisition either within or without the law or apply any religious test to the
holding of office. The mind of America must be forever free."
Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. President, Inaugural Address, 3/4/1925
"We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over
the power of bigotry and superstition ... In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it
is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him
of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States."
George Washington (1732-1799) 1st U.S. President, letter to the members of the New Church
in Baltimore, 1793, in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States,
Vol 1. p. 497, quoted from The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom
"Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those
which spring from any other cause."
George Washington
"I am tolerant of all creeds. Yet if any sect suffered itself to be used for political objects I would
meet it by political opposition. In my view church and state should be separate, not only in form, but
fact. Religion and politics should not be mingled."
Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) 13th U.S. President (1850-1853)
"In 1850, I believe, the church property in the United States, which
paid no tax, amounted to $87 million. In 1900, without a check, it is
safe to say, this property will reach a sum exceeding $3 billion. I
would suggest the taxation of all property equally."
Ulysses S. Grant, 18th U.S. President, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, James A. Haught, ed.
"Encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar appropriated
for their support shall be appropriated to the support of any
sectarian schools. Resolve that neither the state nor nation, nor
both combined, shall support institutions of learning other than
those sufficient to afford every child growing up in the land of
opportunity of a good common school education, unmixed with sectarian,
pagan, or Atheistical dogmas. Leave the matter of religion to the
family altar, the church and the private school supported entirely by
private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate."
Ulysses S. Grant, address to the Army of the Tennessee, Des Moines, Iowa, September 25, 1875,
from The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom
"Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely
by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separated."
Ulysses S. Grant
"The United States is no more a Christian nation because most of its citizens are Christians than it is a 'white' nation because most of its citizens are white. We are Americans because we practice democracy a