Atheist Quotes

This collection of quotes has been assembled from thinkers from a wide range of fields, including philosophers, psychologists, and scientists. Not all of those quoted below would call themselves atheists, and not all of the quotations are simple attacks on religion, but all of them represent an interesting perspective on the atheist world-view.

"Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it." [John Adams]
"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." [Isaac Asimov]
"I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him." [Mikhail Bakunin]
"If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?" [Justin Brown]
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." [Wiliam K Clifford]
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." [Richard Dawkins]
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” [Richard Dawkins]
“We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” [Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press (1989), p201]
“Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.” [Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Oxford University Press (1988), p316]
"I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.... This is a somewhat new kind of religion." [Albert Einstein]
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” [Epicurus]
“It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.” [Ludwig Feuerbach]
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." [Benjamin Franklin]
"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be." [Sigmund Freud]
“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” [David Hume, Of Miracles]
“Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with these phantoms.” [Robert Ingersoll, The Gods]
"This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves." "Hands that help are far better than lips that pray." [Robert Ingersoll]
"If a man would follow today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly, the teachings of the new, he would be insane." [Robert Ingersoll]
"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." [Thomas Jefferson]
"The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion." [Karl Marx]
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." [Karl Marx]
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." [Delos B. McKown]
“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow creatures.” [John Stuart Mill, Utility of Religion]
"The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see." [Huang Po]
“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.” [Bertrand Russell]
"We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence." [Bertrand Russell]
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” [Stephen F Roberts]
“The existentialist... thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoievsky said, ‘If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.’ That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.” [Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism]
"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." [George Bernard Shaw]
“If God exists, he certainly existed before religion. He is a philosopher’s God, logically inferred from self-evident premises. That he should have been taken up by a glorified supporters’ club is only a matter of psychological interest.” ["George" in Tom Stoppard, Jumpers]
"Faith is believing what you know ain't so." [Mark Twain]
"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of." [Mark Twain]