Famous People and Anti Religious Quotes

"Religion is just mind control."
-George Carlin, comedian
 

"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose."

-Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites."

"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity."

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782.

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors." -Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies."
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man."
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President, author, scientist, architect, educator, and diplomat
 

"My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic."
-Carl Sagan, American astronomer and author
 

"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."
-Abraham Lincoln, American president (1809-1865)

"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 religion than it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
 

"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. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism."
 

"I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it."

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."
-Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist
 

"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 that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time."
 

"Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night"
-Isaac Asimov, Russian-born – American author
 

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough."
-Alex Haley, author "Roots"

"I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life."
-Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist

"All thinking men are atheists."

On page 144 of Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals, it states that despite being raised in a strict Congregationalist household, Ernest "did not only not believe in God but regarded organized religion as a menace to human happiness", "seems to have been devoid of the religious spirit", and "ceased to practise religion at the earliest possible moment."

Other’s have pointed out that Hemingway used the non-existence of God as a theme in his books.
-Ernest Hemingway, American author (1899-1961)

"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."

"Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?"
-Arthur C. Clarke, author

From the age of forty he was, to use his own words, a complete dis-believer in Christianity. He professed himself an Agnostic, regarding the problem of the universe as beyond our solution, "For myself," he wrote, "I do not believe in any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities."

"The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."

"It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science." [Quoted in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science by Michael Shermer.
-Charles Robert Darwin, English naturalist (1809-1882)

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies."
 

"Lighthouses are more helpful then churches."
-Benjamin Franklin, American Founding Father, author, and inventor
 

"Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge. "
-Ayn Rand, Russian-born author (1905-1982)

"I'm glad some people have that faith. I don't have that faith. If there is a God, a caring God, then we have to figure he's done an extraordinary job of making a very cruel world."
-Dave Matthews, South African rock musician

"Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race."

"Fear is the parent of cruelty, therefore it is no wonder if religion and cruelty have gone hand-in-hand."

"I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting."

"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out."
-Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, educator, mathematician, and social critic (1872-1970)

"I wasn't raised Catholic, but I used to go to Mass with my friends, and I viewed the whole business as a lot of very enthralling hocus-pocus. There's a guy hanging upon the wall in the church, nailed to a cross and dripping blood, and everybody's blaming themselves for that man's torment, but I said to myself, 'Forget it. I had no hand in that evil. I have no original sin. There’s no blood of any sacred martyr on my hands. I pass on all of this."

"I believe that all important matters have to be settled here, not in the clouds somewhere after we kick off."
-Billy Joel, American musician

"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment, to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure. "

"I believe that relgion is the belief in future life and in God. I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose."
-Clarence Seward Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938). (Scopes Monkey Trail- Creationism in schools)

"The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion."

"The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation."

"The bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire...Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up."

She wrote of the Bible, "I found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. Surely the writers had a very low idea of the nature of their god. They made him not only anthropomorphic, but of the very lowest type, jealous and revengeful, loving violence rather than mercy. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women." [Women Without Superstition]
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton, American suffragist (1815-1902)

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

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

"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense." [Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]

"Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil." [Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]

"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
-Francois Marie Arouet "Voltaire", French author and playwright (1694-1778)

"If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine- but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you’ve been bad or good- and CARES about any of it- to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working. "
-Frank Zappa, American musician

"They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly. … Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit."
-Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

"So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is truth?"

"The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, a self-derision, and self-mutilation."

"All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race – before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its God to be truthful and understandable in his communications."

"The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God."

"There is no devil and no hell. Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body: fear therefore nothing any more."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, German philologist and philosopher (1844-1900)

"I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will–and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain."

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."
-Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek (1921-1991)

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."

"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."
-George Bernard Shaw, Irish-born English playwright (1856-1950)

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, Famous Atheist & Quotessuperstition, bigotry, and persecution."

"In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people."

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."

"What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy."
-James Madison, American president and political theorist (1751-1836)

"Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions, Doctrines and Oaths, and whole carloads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?"

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity."

"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."
-John Adams, U.S. President, Founding Father of the United States

"Faith is believing something you know ain’t true."

"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian."

"It (the Bible) is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies."

"A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows."

"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness… It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light … by contrast."

"I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious — unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force."

"If there is a God, he is a malign thug."

"‘In God We Trust.’ I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true."

"It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

"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]
- Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist (1835-1910)