Sometimes believers claim, that Adolf Hitler was an atheist and killing Jews has nothing to do with religion. So... Adolf Hitler - "Mein Kampf" - Volume One: A Reckoning - 2. Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." - words of true "atheist" :).

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

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.

Only two things are infinite, The Universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about The Universe.

Camels and Christians receive their burdens kneeling.

Nothing is more logical than persecution. Religious tolerance is a kind of infidelity.

Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.

Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumption and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure.

For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.

Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought.

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.

If the hammer and the shuttle could move themselves, slavery would be unnecessary.

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

Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.

Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His. (Tuez-les tous; Dieu reconnaitra les siens.)

Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilization. It has kept mankind in chains.

When socialism comes into power, the Roman Church will advocate socialism with the same vigor [with which] it is now favoring feudalism and slavery.

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.

Even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

The reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts: they know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance.

If God needs your help, he's not God.

When you die, you actually do become closer to God, because you won't exist.

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.

There is not any thing, which has contributed so much to delude mankind in religious matters, as mistaken apprehensions concerning supernatural inspiration or revelation; not considering that all true religion originates from reason, and can not otherwise be understood, but by the exercise and improvement of it.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

Knowledge is power. (Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.)

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Truth can never be reached by just listening to the voice of an authority.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.

People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.

A lively, disinterested, persistent liking for truth is extraordinarily rare. Action and faith enslave thought, both of the in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism or doubt.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults -- a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

There is an illusion of central position, justifying one’s own purposes as right and everybody else’s as wrong, and providing a proper degree of paranoia. Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.

We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

Don't let Krusty's death get you down, boy. People die all the time. Just like that. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow. Well, good night.

God has no place within these walls, just as facts have no place within organized religion.

Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else -- and it hasn't -- it's that girls should stick to girl's sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such and such.

Phfft! Facts. You can use them to prove anything.

Stealing! How could you? Haven't you learned anything from that guy who gives sermons at church? Captain what's-his-name?

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centures since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

When I die I won't go to heaven or hell, there will just be nothingness.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.

No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.

There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.

When philosophic reason is clear and certain by intuition or necessary induction, no subsequent revelation supported by prophecies or miracles can supersede it.

As scarce as the truth is, the supply is always greater than the demand.

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.

In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.

The true fanatic is a theocrat, someone who sees himself as acting on behalf of some super-personal force: the Race, the Party, History, the Proletariat, the Poor, and so on. These absolve him from evil, hence he may safely do anything in their service.

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

[Disestablishment was] the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.

Miracles are doomed; they will drop out like fairies and witchcraft, from among the matter which serious people believe.

The gods of men are sillier than their kings and queens, and emptier and more powerless.

All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.

All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.

Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

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.

Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians -- all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.

Religion is a collective insanity.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

Theology is the science of the divine lie

We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians or poets: 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 practice.

Whatever else I might have thought of [President George W.] Bush's call, with its assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks VapoRub for the national charley horse, it's clear that his hands were reaching for any hands but mine.

When I sent out a casual and nonscientific poll of my own to a wide cast of acquaintances, friends and colleagues, I was surprised, but not really, to learn that maybe 60 percent claimed a belief in a God of some sort, including people I would have bet were unregenerate skeptics. Others just shrugged. They don't think about this stuff. It doesn't matter to them. They can't know, they won't beat themselves up trying to know and for that matter they don't care if their kids believe or not.

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate and reckless of consequence, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.

What's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.

It is not by the sword or the spear, by soldiers or by armed force that truth is to be promoted, but by counsel and gentle persuasion.

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the alter of the great historical ideas -- justice or progress or happiness of future generations...or emancipation of a nation or race or class...this is the belief that somewhere...there is a final solution.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.

For example, an unassembled bicycle that arrives at your house in a shipping carton is in a state of disorder. You supply the energy of your muscles (which you get from food that came ultimately from sunlight) to assemble the bike. You have got order from disorder by supplying energy. The Sun is the source of energy input to the earth's living systems and allows them to evolve.

This whole Christian theology thing is that god came down to experience life through his son. Well, how's he experiencing life if he doesn't get laid? Give me a break. And why would he not get laid, as he created the apparatus in the first place?

A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.

As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.

The most genuine and efficacious charity is that which greases the paws of the priests; such charity covers a multitude of sins.

The son of God is the same as the son of man; the son of man is the same as the son of God. God, the father, is the same as Christ, the son; Christ, the son, is the same as God, the father. This language may appear confused to unbelievers, but Christians will readily understand it.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

What can I hope when all is right?

What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?

Whenever an important event, a revolution, or a calamity turns to the profit of the church, such is always signalised as the Finger of God.

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it unwise, and their conscience it is wrong.

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve it through not dying.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

In real life, Keaton believes in God. But she also believes that the radio works because there are tiny people inside it.

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.