To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Joseph Addison

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

Soren Kierkegaard

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

Cardinal Bellarmine

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

Thomas Jefferson

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

Frank Zappa

To some degree Satanism is purely a kind of disease of Christianity. You've got to really be Christian to believe in Satan.

Alan Moore

If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education.

William Jennings Bryan

The Media is ruled by Satan. But yet I wonder if many Christians fully understand that.

Jimmy Swaggart

I started out by believing God for a newer car than the one I was driving. I started out believing God for a nicer apartment than I had. Then I moved up.

Jim Bakker

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.

Pat Buchanan

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

Richard Francis Burton

The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion.

H. G. Wells

I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity.

John Lennon

The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense.

Thomas Paine

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

Francis Bacon

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.

Carl Sagan

A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

Friedrich Nietzsche

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter ... than you and I.

Edgar Allan Poe

Religion is induced insanity.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

George Orwell

Therefore, I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work.

Adolf Hitler

If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mohometans, Jews or Christians of any Sect, or they may be Atheists.

George Washington

The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.

Jerry Falwell

Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [as the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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

Susan B. Anthony.

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.-- George Bernard Shaw

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

After more than 700 hours of studying this subject, I have come to the conclusion that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is either one of the most wicked, vicious, heartless hoaxes ever foisted on the minds of human beings -- or it is the most remarkable fact of history.

Josh McDowell

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.

Isaac Asimov

That which I have seen in Rome and even in England leads me to believe that men have strangely mistaken the spirit in their zeal for the letter of Christianity.

Julia Ward Howe

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

C. S. Lewis

I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.

Charles Darwin

Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey.

Clarence Darrow

And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple to haunt the senate or the market.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins

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

Ambrose Bierce

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.

George Carlin

My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it.

Thomas Edison

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

Ann Coulter

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.

Benjamin Franklin

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

Bertrand Russell

I was almost persuaded to be a Christian.

Emily Dickinson

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.

Albert Einstein

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

George Eliot

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Naturally matters of deep faith are not settled merely by cleverness or wit. The difficulty, I find, is that atheists always seem to have the best quotes.

Julie McGalliard