Quotes on Religion and Philosophy

Mikhail Bakunin:

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.

God and the State, (1871)

Nicolai A. Berdyaev:

We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.

Russian Christian philosopher. repr. In "Atheism," Christian Existentialism, ch. 5 (1965). Truth and Revelation (1953). Quoted from The Columbia World of Quotations, 1996.

George Bush:

I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Interview with Robert I. Sherman of American Atheist Press on August 27, 1988

Marcus Tullius Cicero:

The habit of arguing in support of atheism, whether it be done from conviction or in pretense, is a wicked and impious practice.

II, 168. Quoted from The Columbia World of Quotations, 1996.

Clarence Darrow:

I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose.

Ludwig Feuerbach:

If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism - at least in the sense of this work - is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

The Essence of Christianity, preface (1841)

Libor Growsky:

I'm a nonbeliever. It's connected to our history. Religion limited the freedom of the people. I don't see a difference between the Communists and the Catholics. They each want people to comply with their ideals My sense of morality comes from literature and my family.

Czech citizen, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2003

Thomas Hobbes:

But they that hold God to be [an incorporeal substance] ... do absolutely make God to be nothing at all. But how? Were they atheists? No. For though by ignorance of the consequence they said that which was equivalent to atheism, yet in their hearts they thought God a substance ... So that this atheism by consequence is a very easy thing to be fallen into, even by the most godly men of the church.

English Works, "An Answer to Dr. Bramhall," vol. 4, p. 384, Molesworth (1839-1845).

R.A.K. Mason:

Belief is being ignorant and denying it; agnosticism is being ignorant and respectfully admitting it; atheism is being ignorant and glorying in it.

R.A.K. Mason, New Zealand poet. Quoted in: "'Higher law' has nasty track record," Gordon McLauchlan. The New Zealand Herald, October 25, 2003.

A. A. Milne:

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

Recalled on his death January 31, 1956. Quoted from: Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, 1988.

Michael Novak:

One must feel sorry for atheists. They seem so lonely. Alone not only under the vast stars of a summer's night, in all this immense cosmos. And passing through it as we do all, as evanescently as fireflies. But alone also in this religion-drenched country, most of whose public spaces reek of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

National Review Online, July 12, 2002

Michael Novak:

Most atheists, of course, would rather get rid of God, but still keep the rationality in the universe that comes from actually having a God, Who understood all things before they were, and then made them to be. Atheists of that sort would even like to keep the Jewish vision of community, justice, and compassion, as set forth in the Prophets. All this, without keeping the God of Israel.

National Review Online, July 12, 2002

Michael Novak:

Atheism is a long-term project. It is not completed when one ceases believing in God. It is necessary to carry it through until one empties from the world all the conceptual space once filled by God. One must also, for instance, abandon the conviction that the events, phenomena, and laws of the world we live in (those of the whole universe) cohere, belong together, have a unity. What is born from chance may be ruled by chance, quite insanely.

National Review Online, July 12, 2002

John Osborne:

Here we are, we're alone in the universe, there's no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We've only got ourselves. Somehow, we've just got to make a go of it. We've only ourselves.

Jean, in The Entertainer, no. 12. Quoted from: The Columbia Dictionary Of Quotations.

Marquis de Sade:

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, (1791)

Jean-Paul Sartre:

Atheistic existentialism...declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality.

Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)

Jean-Paul Sartre:

Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing...as he wills to be after that leap towards existence.

Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)

George Smith:

To say that atheism is credible is to suggest that the atheist may be right; to say that the atheist may be right is to suggest that the Christian may be wrong; to say that the Christian may be wrong is to suggest that faith may be an unreliable guide to knowledge; to say that faith may be an unreliable guide to knowledge is to suggest that each and every tenet of Christianity should be reexamined in the light of reason - and from here all hell breaks loose as the process of deconversion rushes headlong to its logical conclusion.

Why Atheism?, (1999)

John Updike:

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, ch. 4 (1989).

Gore Vidal:

I'm a born-again atheist.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.:

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

Hocus Pocus, pg. 182