Religious Quotes

A collection of thoughts from the brilliant to the sublime.

"Only the fool says in his heart: There is no god -- The wise says it to the world" - Anonymous

"Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life." - Aristotle

"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." - Isaac Asimov

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

"The atheist does not say, "There is no God," but he says, "I know not what you mean by God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation."" - Charles Bradlaugh

"I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion." - James Buchanan

"The time has come for honest men to denounce false teachers and attack false gods." - Luther Burbank

"The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself." - Richard Burton

"I do not believe in any revealed religion. I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another." - Lord Byron; George Gordon Noel Byron [Sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale]

"The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them." - Joseph Campbell

"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense." - Chapman Cohen

"The universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind." - Auguste Comte

"I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose." - Clarence Darrow

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

"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

"It is the best book ever written on the subject. There is nothing like it!" - Thomas Edison on Thomas Paine's Age of Reason

"In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god." - Albert Einstein

"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

"God, immortality, duty -- how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third." - George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans]

"As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." - Benjamin Franklin

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." - Benjamin Franklin

"The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'" - Robert Ingersoll

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." - Karl Marx

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

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." - Gene Roddenberry

"The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." - Bertrand Russell

"It is sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research, fine-tuning our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists remain mired in medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals in the belly of an Ark." - Michael Shermer

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." - Mark Twain