What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

- Christopher Hitchens

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.

- Thomas H. Huxley

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

- Christopher Hitchens

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 minds harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.

- Albert Einstein

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever -- this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

- Albert Einstein

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

- Christopher Hitchens

We have a need for what I would call "the transcendent" or "the numinous" or even "the ecstatic," which comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't respond to things of that sort. But I think the cultural task is to separate those impulses and those needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.

- Christopher Hitchens

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

- Robert G. Ingersoll

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).

- George Orwell

Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.

- Heywood Broun

Is god willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?

- Epicurus

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

- Quentin Crisp

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody -- not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms -- had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

- Christopher Hitchens

If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.

- H. L. Mencken

True religion, like our founding principles, requires that the rights of the disbeliever be equally acknowledged with those of the believer.

- A. Powell Davies



No term of common discourse is so vague and elusive in meaning as the term "God."

- A. Eustace Haydon



I don't try to imagine a personal god; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.

- Albert Einstein



Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.

- Marcus Aurelius



In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

- Sam Harris



I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

- Vincent van Gogh



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



Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

- Douglas Adams



I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.

- Thomas Alva Edison



An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.

- Simone Weil



I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

- Richard Dawkins



I have known many good people who did not believe in God. But I have never known a human being who was good who did not believe in people. [language slightly modified]

- John Lovejoy Elliott



There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

- Friedrich Nietzsche



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



I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

- Christopher Hitchens



My creed:
To love justice, to long for the right,
to love mercy,
to pity the suffering, to assist the weak,

- Robert G. Ingersoll



I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his [sic] creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious ourselves.

- Albert Einstein



The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.... For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!

- Frederick Douglass



The President of the United States summons the nation to church on Thanksgiving Day to give thanks to "Almighty God" for the abundant harvest and all other blessings. But what has Almighty God -- I have no desire to appear irreverent -- what has Almighty God as a personal being to do with the harvests? If it is he who produces our crops, then being Almighty there should never be a failure of crops. But since crops frequently fail, it follows that there is no Almighty person in charge of them -- unless he brings failure purposely. Therefore, if God is to be thanked for large crops, he must be blamed when the crops are a failure. . . . If God sends the rain and the sunshine which develops and ripens our wheat, who sends the storms and the insects which destroy much of it? And if he sends both, then why not thank him for one and blame him for the other?

- John Dietrich



When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"

- Quentin Crisp



I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

- G. K. Chesterton



I once wanted to become an atheist but I gave up . . . they have no holidays.

- Henny Youngman



Do not pass by my epitaph, traveler.
But having stopped, listen and learn, then go your way.
There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon,
No caretaker Aiakos, no dog Cerberus.
All we who are dead below
Have become bones and ashes, but nothing else.
I have spoken to you honestly, go on, traveler,
Lest even while dead I seem loquacious to you.

- Roman Tombstone



As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.

- Protagoras



When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

- Pearl S. Buck



Believing in gods always causes confusion.

- Pearl S. Buck



Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

- Francis Bacon



How do I define God? I don't.... People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don't. That's why you haven't found my "thoughts on this [for you] criticaI question." I have none, because I see no need for them (apart from the -- often extremely interesting and revealing -- inquiry into human culture an history).

- Noam Chomsky



I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about.

- Wendy Kaminer



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 blind-folded fear.

- Thomas Jefferson