BellaOnline Forums Religion and Spirituality Atheist Atheist Quotes Alphabet Game

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
......Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758


"Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?"
......Jules Feiffer

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."
.....Henry Graham Greene (1904-1991)

Harris, Sam
"Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention."

Haynes, Charles
"If the aim is to keep 'Christ' in the shopping-mall Christmas or to ensure that pagan trees and mistletoe don�t lose their Christian labels, then it might make sense to attack presidents and business owners who commit the �happy holiday� sin. But if the goal is to restore the religious meaning of the Christian holy day, then they are aiming at the wrong Target."

Hazlitt, William
"The garb of religion is the best cloak for power."

Heine, Heinrich
"Religion cannot sink lower than when somehow it is raised to a state religion ... It becomes then an avowed mistress."

Heinlein, Robert
"Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."

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

Hoffer, Eric
"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."

Hugo, Victor
"There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster -- and an extinguisher: the parson."

Huxley, Thomas Henry
"Skepticism is the highest duty, and blind faith the one impardonable sin."

I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm, -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.
Robert Ingersoll
from the Field-Ingersoll Debate (Part 2): "A Reply To The Rev Henry M Field, DD"

Jefferson, Thomas

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. 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."

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society."

" the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that such a character existed."

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."

"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."

"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."

"The death of dogma is the birth of morality."

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
German philosopher, considered by many the most influential thinker of modern times

President Abraham Lincoln
"What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree."

John Locke
"I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, it is a matter of faith, and above reason."

Lucretius
"All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher."

C.S. Lewis
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Anne Lamott
"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

Pope Leo XIII
"The equal toleration of all religions...is the same as atheism."

Gypsy Rose Lee
"Praying is like a rocking chair -- it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere."

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

William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"The doctrine of a material hell in its effect was to chill and deaden the sympathies, predispose men to inflict suffering, and to retard the march of civilization."

Robert E. Lee
"Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?"

Joseph Lewis
"Man's inhumanity to man will continue as long as man loves God more than he loves his fellow man."

Walter Lippman
"The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble across a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it representative of a whole class."

Richard Lederer
"There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages."


Gustaf Lindborg
"The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail"

Doug McLeod
"I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence"

H. L. Mencken
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart"

Ferdinand Magellan
"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church"

Isaac Newton:
"If the ancient churches, in debating and deciding the greatest mysteries of religion, knew nothing of these two texts, I understand not why we should be so fond of them now the debate is over."

Friedrich Nietzsche:
"Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life."