BellaOnline Forums Religion and Spirituality Atheist Atheist Quotes Alphabet Game

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
Penn (of Penn and Teller)

The moment that one loses confidence in God, or immortality in the universe, [one becomes] more self-reliant, more courageous, and the more solicitous of aid where only human aid is possible.
Samuel Putnam


When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion
Robert M. Pirsig

Who needs Satan when you have a God like this?
Robert M. Price

Re: The Bible. - If I watched a football match then orally relayed the events. This is repeated from father to son orally for 500 years. How accurate do you think the resulting report would be? Yet the first thing any theist does is quote the Bible!!
Chris Parry


...and my favorite : )

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
Emo Philips

Francis Quarles:
Flatter not thyself in thy faith in God if thou hast not charity for thy neighbor.

Salvatore Quasimodo:
After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question.

Pasquier Quesnel:
Zeal is very blind, or badly regulated, when it encroaches upon the rights of others.

Edgar Quinet:
What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?

Sally Quinn:
It is only in the fundamentalist religions that women are relegated to second class. Radical Evangelicals, Muslims, and Jews all have the same view of women.

Mary Poppins - "Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down"

Brad Pitt as Doc Holliday - "You're a daisy if you do"

Norm from Cheers - "Women, can't live with 'em....pass the beer nuts."

Outlaw Josey Wales - "Well, you gonna pull them pistols or just whistle Dixie?"

Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp - "You tell 'em I'm coming and Hell's coming with me."

Hmmm...those don't appear to be alphabetically placed, but I suppose one might say they are atheist quotes, if by atheist you mean, "A person who talks about anything and everything except religion."

And now for the letter R:

Bertrand Russell:
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.

We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.

I cannot...deny that [religion] has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

Yeah, my bad. I forgot it was it was an alphabetical game and I was just having a little fun by putting quotes from movies in there.

Just trying to be not so serious all of the time.

LOL. Ok. These quotes do tend to get a bit serious, don't they?

And now back to our regularly scheduled program: the letter "S".

Carl Sagan:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

William Shakespeare:
It is a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it.

Arthur Schopenhauer:
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.

Seneca:
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Paul Tillich:

Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.

Paul Tillich:

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life.

Roman Tombstone:

Do not pass by my epitaph, traveler.
But having stopped, listen and learn, then go your way.
There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon,
No caretaker Aiakos, no dog Cerberus.
All we who are dead below
Have become bones and ashes, but nothing else.
I have spoken to you honestly, go on, traveler,
Lest even while dead I seem loquacious to you.

Mark Twain:

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.

Mark Twain:

Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion �- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.

Mark Twain:

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Autobiography, 1959

Carl Sagan
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science.
The Demon-Haunted World


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."
[Letters from the Earth]

A little shocked to see amadeus quoting Mark Twain who was quite obviously an atheist. Are we making some headway here?

My favorite is Carl Sagan. I have been waiting for the S.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
- Carl Sagan

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.
-Carl Sagan

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
-Carl Sagan

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

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
-Carl Sagan

Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy. -Carl Sagan

Miguel de Unamuno:
The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.

Benjamin Underwood:
There is no argument worthy of the name that will justify the union of the Christian religion with the State. Every consideration of justice and equality forbids it ... Every sentiment of honor, every manly feeling, a righteous indignation at injustice. a determination to submit to no religious intolerance, love of peace and the welfare and prosperity of our country, with an ardent and unfaltering attachment to republican institutions -- all combine to induce us to demand a separation of Church and State, total and complete, now, henceforth, and forever.

John Updike:
Whenever religion touches science, it gets burned. In the sixteen century astronomy, in the seventeenth microbiology, in the eighteenth geology and paleontology, in the nineteenth Darwin's biology all grotesquely extended the world-frame and sent churchmen scurrying for cover in ever smaller, more shadowy nooks, little gloomy ambiguous caves in the psyche where even now neurology is cruelly harrying them, gouging them out from the multifolded brain like wood lice from under the woodpile.