by Bandoli.no
Religion is regarded by the common people as true,
by the wise as false,
and by the rulers as useful.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca,
Roman philosopher and statesman 4 BC – AD 65
There are two classes of men:
intelligent men without religion,
and religious men without intelligence.
Abu Ala Al-Ma'arri, Arab philosopher 973 - 1057 AD
"Those who can make you believe in absurdities can also make you commit atrocities."
Francois Marie Arouet "Voltaire",
French author and playwright (1694-1778)
"Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror."
Voltaire
"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world."
Voltaire
"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense."
Voltaire
"The whole history of the Christian Church is a mixture of errors and violence."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
German author (1749-1832)
"All religions have been made by men."
Napoleon Bonaparte, French emperor (1769-1821)
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping
common people quiet."
Napoleon Bonaparte
"It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet (1792-1822)
"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced."
Shelley
"Our ignorance is God; what we know is science."
Robert Green Ingersoll,
American politician and lecturer (1833-1899)
"With soap, baptism is a good thing."
Ingersoll
"The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know."
Ingersoll
"Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who drowned his own?"
Ingersoll
The inspiration of the bible depends on
the ignorance of the person who reads it.
Ingersoll
"As people become more intelligent
they care less for preachers and more for teachers."
Ingersoll
"Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain",
American author and humorist (1835-1910)
"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
"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."
Mark Twain
"A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. "
Mark Twain
Mr. Clemens was once asked whether he feared death. He said that he did not, in view of the fact that he had been dead for billions and billions of years before he was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain",
On Theology:
"Is it not grotesque when the representatives of an antiquated myth-sorcery, who believes in trinity, angels, devils, hell, virgin-birth, bodily Ascension, making of water into wine, wine to blood, - when they want to impress us with their "science"? "
Karlheinz Deschner, German writer
On the Trinity:
"For a "monotheistic" religion
it should be sufficient with three gods."
Arnulf Øverland, Norw. poet
"What is there to be said about a Church which certainly promises its believers eternal salvation,
but at the same time condemns the non-believers,
all those who think differently, to an eternal torment in hell?
- If that Church absolutely must talk about love,
then it should do so very quietly."
Arnulf Øverland, Norwegian poet
and writer (1889-1968)
Religion is an insult to human dignity.
With or without it you would have
good people doing good things
and evil people doing evil things.
But for good people to do evil things,
that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
Everyone Is Entitled To Their Own Opinion's,
But Not Their Own Facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses,
the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."
Albert Einstein
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.
And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.
As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups,
although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.
Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Albert Einstein
By the age of 12 Albert Einstein was questioning
the truth of many biblical stories:
"The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression"
Albert Einstein
"Religion is all bunk."
Thomas Edison, American inventor (1847-1931)
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, or of a God."
Thomas Edison, American inventor (1847-1931)
"All thinking men are atheists." [A Farewell to Arms]
Ernest Hemingway, American author (1899-1961)
"I am an atheist, thanks be to God."
Luis Bunuel, Spanish film director (1900-1983)
Surely you do not believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?
Aristophanes
What can be asserted whithout evidence can also be dismissed whithout evidence.
Christopher Hitchens
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Infinity0
The invisible and the non-existent
look very much alike.
Delos McKown
Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day;
Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death
while praying for a fish.
Unknown
Everyone starts out being an atheist.
No one is born with belief in anything.
Andy Rooney
Religion does three things quite effectively: divides people, controls people, deludes people.
Carlespie McKinney
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
Chapman Cohen
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot
Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky.
George Carlin
Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Religions vary in their degree of idiocy,
but I reject them all.
Gene Roddenberry
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
Henry Mencken
Suppose we've chosen the wrong god.
Every time we go to church
we're just making him madder and madder.
Homer Simpson
Prayer has no place in public school, just like facts have no place in organized religion.
Superintendent Chalmers (The Simpsons)
Don't pray in my school,
and I won't think in your church.
Unknown
Religions are all alike founded
upon fables and mythologies.
Thomas Jefferson
All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.
Baron D'Holbach
People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs.
Brad Reddekopp
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered.
Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
Unknown
Two hands working can do more
than a thousand clasped in prayer.
Unknown
An idea does not gain truth as it gains followers.
Amanda bloom
Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses,
it's the cyanide.
Tom Robbins
Religion is against women's right and freedom.
In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.
Taslima Nasrin
The bible and church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women's emancipation.
Elizabeth C. Stanton
I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
Frederick Douglass (American statesman and former slave)
The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail.
Gustaf Lindborg
Every man thinks God is on his side.
The rich and powerful know he is.
Jean Anouilh
Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.
Jesse Ventura
Fear is the mother of all gods. N
ature does all things spontaneously by herself without their meddling.
Lucretius
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.
James Madison
All religions are pieced together out of elements which seem so at odds with reason that any intelligence laughs at them.
Pierre Charron
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understand the world.
Richard Dawkins
Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind,
tyranny in religion is the worst.
Thomas Paine
Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.
Blaise Pascal
Gods always behave like the people
who created them.
Zora Hurston
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
Benjamin Franklin
If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the gods, then knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
Baron D'Holbach
Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
Benjamin Disraeli
You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes,
and you say we are the ones that need help?
Dan Barker
I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
James Buchanan
Religious leaders will always avail themselves of public ignorance for their own purpose.
Thomas Jefferson
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Sigmund Freud
It is better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however reassuring.
Carl Sagan
The most heinous crimes have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
Gandhi
For much of history, religion may have been a necessary evil,
but why has it been more evil than necessary?
Arthur C. Clarke
It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.
Ilka Chase
Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity.
Now that humanity had come of age,
it should be left behind.
Sigmund Freud
Faith is the determination to remain ignorant in the face of all evidence that you are ignorant.
Shaun Mason
All natural institutions of churches, appear to me human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind.
Thomas Paine
The greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called religion.
Thomas Paine
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call god;
this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissue.
Edward Abbey
Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief.
One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.
Edward Abbey
When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours.
Stephen Roberts
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
Benjamin Franklin
Religions are like fireflies.
They require darkness in order to shine.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover
truth, reason, and morality.
Baron D'Holbach
I'm having the best day of my life,
and I owe it all to not going to Church!
Homer Simpson
I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids.
So why should I spend half my Sunday
hearing about how I'm going to Hell?
Homer Simpson
"You know, the one with all the well meaning rules that don't work out in real life, uh, Christianity" .
Homer Simpson
The lesson is: Our God is vengeful!
O spiteful one, show me who to smite and they shall be smoten.
Homer Simpson
Religions are like farts.
Yours is good, but everyone else's stinks.
Unknown