Note: The following quotes got chosen for the message and not for historical purposes. Unlike other areas in the Freethinkers site, no one here has thoroughly checked the sources. If you wish to use these quotes as reliable sources, please research them for accuracy, especially the quotes without citations. If you find a citation error, please let me know. Ed.

Christianity is so frightening and depressing that Christians have to steal the fun and laughter from the pagan holidays just to make their religion palatable.

--Reagan the Pagan

The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.

--Richard Dawkins (from edge.org)

I live in a culture that wholeheartedly embraces the idea that man is inherently evil, and that human beings will not behave themselves unless they live their short lives under the constant threat of immanent and eternal agony. Such a premise affects me very much; I have to live with these people, who one way or another are in constant fear of (not for) their own souls. I don't want my children associating with people who are trained from birth to loathe themselves. It strikes me as very unhealthy.

--Elf Sternberg

Propaganda has become a bad word thanks to Adolf Hitler and the Catholics who invented the term. So instead of using this bad word, politicians today simply use other terms like: spin doctoring, talking points, etc.

--Pelican the Politician

Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them, you're a mile away, and you have their shoes.

Believing means I'm unsure. If something is true, then either I know it or I don't know it. Therefore, I don't need to believe in anything.

--Ignots Pistachio

Good scientific methodology is not an abstract set of rules dictated by philosophers. It is conditioned by, and determined by, the science itself and the scientists who create the science. What may have constituted scientific proof for a particle physicist of the 1960's-namely the detection of an isolated particle-is inappropriate for a modern quark physicist who can never hope to remove and isolate a quark. Let's not put the cart before the horse. Science is the horse that pulls the cart of philosophy.

--Leonard Susskind

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

With the defeat of the Nazis, the German Reich with its complete infrastructure collapsed, leaving only the two large churches with their practically undamaged organisational structure. All the other organisations, the political parties, the freethinkers' organisations and the unions had been forbidden and broken up.

--Johann Neumann (The Churches in Germany Before and After 1945)

In any other field, you can argue about politics, taste in music, poetry. There's never the feeling that you're supposed to tiptoe away. You're just not allowed to criticize someone's belief if it's a religious belief, though you're perfectly allowed if it's about politics.

--Richard Dawkins (Religion for Dummies)

We first fought...in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

--Serj Tankian

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.

--Don Hirschberg

The Wizard of Oz is more believable. And more fun.

--James Randi on "Why I Deny Religion" (online newsletter, 25 July 2003)

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

--International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1946

You laugh at me because I am different; I laugh because you are all the same.

--Daniel Knode

Stay cool, and don't believe anything the Bush administration tells you. In fact, play it safe: don't believe anything anybody tells you.

--George Carlin (georgecarlin.com)

A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice that have guided and protected him in the past.

--Walter Langer, psychoanalyst (in his psychological profile of Adolf Hitler) [Italics added]

[T]he claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.

--Richard Dawkins (from "Intelligent Thought")

(I had) a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies. It was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude which has never again left me.

--Albert Einstein (Autobiographical Notes, 1949)

Men rarely (if ever) dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

--Robert Heinlein (Time Enough for Love)

Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.

--Mahatma Gandhi

It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

--Richard Dawkins (responding to The Edge's 2005 question)

We cannot tolerate war in this world anymore. Wars are not only disastrous for the societies directly involved but also fatal for all of mankind.

--Whitney Harris (a principle prosecutor in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial)

A deep unfaltering belief signals an alarm that you have great ignorance about something.

--Ignots Pistachio

Three weeks ago my mother died. At the end of her funeral the priest left us with these words as a final reminder of what had been said repeatedly in a variety of ways for the past two days: "We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reuni ted with her in joy." My concern here is not with the truth or falsity of this preposterous belief, but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality. And of the terror that prospect entails. The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic. There is much that we can face apparently only when we can deny it through the working of what we'll soon see is an entire system of guarantees. Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means to be a human being, to remain a child of one's needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of ideas and concepts.

--Walter A. Davis (Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium. Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq, 10 Oct. 04)

The power of the executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.

--Sir Winston Churchill (In a telegram by Churchill from Cairo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, 21 Nov. 1943)

One of the reasons I find the Bible incredulous is that when god speaks to people, nobody ever really freaks out and questions their sanity. I find that awfully convenient. Or, when these preachers on TV say god spoke to them, what the fuck? Shouldn't this be front-page news? Either god is speaking to them and we have a modern day prophet and the newfound words should be published everywhere, or they are criminals for swindling their donations.

--Howard Campbell (Poker Without Cards)

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

--James Madison, letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822

In the Middle East, the Bronze Age people of Canaan--the ancient region between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean that roughly corresponds to Israel--also failed to adapt to the drying out of their lands around 2200 BC(E). In their case, says Arlene Rosen of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, "it was their beliefs that were their undoing. In Canaan, people believed that environmental disasters were caused by a deity unhappy with the people," she says. Like the Mayans, the Canaanites could have coped with the new conditions by introducing new irrigation systems for their crops.

Instead, they attributed the shift in climate to the wrath of the gods, built more temples and prayed for better times. Within a short time, the cities and towns were abandoned and the people became nomadic hearders.

--'Rigid' cultures caught out by climate change (article in the 5 March 1994 edition of New Scientist)

The orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is actually harmful and detrimental. To invest this Christ with such supernatural qualities makes the rejoinder: "Oh, well, he had a better chance for that kind of life than we can possible have." In other words, one could easily use this as a means to hide behind his failures. So that the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied.

--Martin Luther King, Jr. ("The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus," 1950)

We live in a twisted world, where right is wrong and wrong reigns supreme. It is a chilling fact that most of the world's leaders believe in nonsensical fairytales about the nature of reality. They believe in Gods that do not exist, and religions that could not possibly be true. We are driven to war after war, violence on top of violence to appease madmen who believe in gory mythologies. These men are called Christians, Muslims and Jews.

--Cenk Uygur (If You're a Christian, Muslim or Jew - You are wrong)

Be comforted that we have each other to depend on! When waters rise and swallow crops, we count on one another to plant those crops again, to rebuild homes, to care for our sick! Some blame God and demand we make sacrifice to Him. If your village was being flooded would you, Erasmus, butcher your daughters like Abraham tried with Isaac, because some priest told you God demanded it? Or would you try to build canals to divert the water, understanding that there is a mechanism to why floods happen and no God has anything to do with it.

--Hypatia (from Brian Trent's novel, "Remembering Hypatia")

The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.

--Will Durant

In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

--Justice Robert H. Jackson

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

--Albert Camus

People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.

--Hippocrates

The great progress that has been made in medicine and in science has not necessarily been made by men and women who don't believe in anything supernatural but it has been made by men and women who when they are studying it refuse to believe that there is anything supernatural.

--Dr. Sherwin Nuland (author of "How We Die," in an interview on C-Span's "Book TV")

Korzybski suggested dozens of reforms in our speech and our writings, most of which I try to follow. One of them is if people said 'maybe' more often, the world would suddenly become stark, staring sane. Can you see Jerry Falwell saying: "Maybe God hates gay people. Maybe Jesus is the son of God.' Every muezzin in Islam resounding at night in booming voices: 'There is no God except maybe Allah. And maybe Mohammed is his papa. Think about how sane the world would become after a while.

--Robert Anton Wilson (Premature Illumination)

This is the most incompetent government in U.S. history.

--Jerry Springer (On Air America, 21 Sept. 2005)

The philosophical reason why "fair trade" is not in fact fair, comes from the definition of justice. For me, justice is acting in harmony with reality, making decisions on the basis of what reality and the standard of human life require. Oxfam's notion of "fair trade" is the opposite of this: they advocate paying prices for coffee which are in direct conflict with supply and demand, and with the competence and efficiency of the coffee producers, i.e. in conflict with reality. Any departure from reality, for any reason whatsoever, has disastrous consequences.

--Johan Norberg

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.

--Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

What's wrong with this picture:

1. On 20 Oct. 2005, Lashaun Harris heard voices that told her to dump her three young children into the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay so that she could feed them to the sharks. The people of San Francisco and the world were shocked and outraged. She was promptly arrested and charged with murder.

2. George W. Bush heard the voice of God telling him he should invade Iraq. He lied to Congress and the American people and in 2003, he started an illegal war which resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent children (and adults). The world was outraged yet this murderer has not been arrested and to this day remains a free man.

To recapitulate a historical fact that took over 50 years to rescue from myth: the United States did not bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki "to end the war and save countless lives." It did so for four reasons (and in the knowledge that a defeated Japan was pursuing terms of surrender through several diplomatic channels): (1) to avenge Pearl Harbor, (2) to justify the amount of money spent developing the Bomb, (3) to create a laboratory whereby our scientific, medical, and military personnel could study its effects, and (4) to impress the Russians -and the world- with this opening salvo of the Cold War. In short, Hiroshima was the first act of global terrorism. That story couldn't be told, however, and still encounters strenuous resistance from most Americans, because it exposes too many of the guarantees we want to have about our Nation and its actions in history.

--Walter A. Davis (Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium. Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq. 10 Oct. 04)

It is the Christian attitude that gradually empties the world of its substance... since the substance resided in a conglomeration of symbols.

--Jaspers (quoted by Albert Camus in "The Rebel")

When the thunderous clouds of fascists past and corporatists present finally dissipate over the vast lands of the United States, leaving in its wake a nation recovering from the violent downpours of mass lunacy, fear and collective schizophrenia that have caused a dustbowl-style drought of humanity in the nation of gluttonous undertakings, it will finally be seen, beyond the enveloping haze of post 9/11 hypnosis hindering American visibility, the devastation of what was done to us and what has been done to the world in our name, oftentimes with our willing consent and through our complicit guilt through silence and acquiescence.

--Manuel Valenzuela (Rise of the Amerikan Nazis Part III of III: Amerikan Terrorists, American Tragedy)

Brother will kill brother

Spilling blood across the land.
Killing for religion.
Something I don't understand.

--"Holy Wars The Punishment Due" by Megadeth

People who talk of outlawing the atomic bomb are mistaken - what needs to be outlawed is war.

--Leslie Richard Groves

We have a Department of Defense (once called the Department of War), but it is really a Department of Offense, and we don't have a Department of Peace. Without a department to balance the warmongers, we will forever continue as a nation of war.

--Pelican the Politician

The Catholic Church was the first organization to recognize that gamering consensus was an effective path to ruling people. The church was the first to employ this tactic. Using this tactic means that they recognized that if you seize the mind, the body will follow.

--Howard Campbell (Poker Without Cards)

As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.

--Richard Dawkins (from the edge.org)

There's something problematic when any religion is taken literally and when people try to impose it on others. It was true for Christianity and Europeans, who historically were happy to go the Holy Land and slaughter religious infidels there. Just 400 years ago in Europe, we had wars on religious grounds. The key was that Europe figured out ways of having different beliefs without slaughtering one another. It was secularization that saved the West, and the same thing has to happen with Islam. People don't have to give up religion, but they have to confine it to a private sphere and not try to impose it via force.

--Johan Norberg

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

--Adam Savage (from MythBusters)

Christians, Islamics, and Jews make the best soldiers. They make themselves feel good about killing others, or sacrificing their lives for someone, or something else. They will even commit the ultimate sacrifice for the tiniest scrap of superstition, with the full confidence that their Sacred Scripts allow such conduct.

--Pelican the Politician

Faith is a reason to become stupid: 'From this point forward, I will remain stupid.' To me, faith-based organizations are responsible for everything I see wrong with this planet. Research-based organizations are responsible for everything I like about it. Before the French Revolution, the average life expectancy was 37 years. Now it's 78 years. All due to research-based organizations. Not at all due to faith-based organizations. All faith-based organizations give you is George Bush. Research-based organizations give you cures for disease.

--Robert Anton Wilson (Premature Illumination)

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

--Christopher Marlowe

How to start your day with a positive attitude:

1. Create a "new folder" on your computer.
2. Name it "George W. Bush".
3. Send it to the trash.
4. Empty the trash.
5. Your computer will ask you: "Do you really want to delete "George W. Bush"?
6. Calmly answer, "Yes", and press the mouse button firmly...

[From Robert A. Wilson's Jokes, Limericks, & Off-Color Tales]

We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.

--Thomas Jefferson

The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. But it is a lovely work if you can stomach it.

--Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein

Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.

--A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"

If religionists applied reason and science to their faith, their religion would simply die. That's why faith must oppose science for its very survival.

--Ignots Pistachio

--Richard Dawkins (from the Edge.org)

I suggest that we might want to depose this incumbent God and start dealing with The Real World. He's proven time and again to be cruel, capricious, and vindictive. He drowns, crushes, burns, and starves millions of us every day. He created cancer, viruses, and germs to invade and destroy our bodies as He sees fit, and uses them very effectively. In His wisdom, He directed those in charge to impede stem cell research so that such a powerful approach would not be available to us and He wouldn't have to strain the Divine Intellect to disarm that defense. We amuse Him as we flail about vainly trying to appease Him. I vote that we dump Him.

--James Randi (on his weekly newsletter, 02 Sept. 2005)

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.

--Richard Dawkins (citing a maxim when explaining the evolution & creationism debate)

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

--John Quincy Adams

You've got to be taught to hate and fear,
You've got to be taught from year to year,
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear-
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade-
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught, before it's too late!
Before you are six, or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate-
You've got to be carefully taught,
You've got to be carefully taught!

--Oscar Hammerstein II (from Rogers & Hammerstein's South Pacific)

Obviously I'm using a metaphor to describe what is essentially a comprehensive assault on scientific expertise. I don't mean a literal war, but I'm referring to the fact that scientific expertise has been undermined very systematically by the Bush Administration and by the Republican Congress on issues ranging from evolution to global climate change to embryonic stem cell research. I think that it's appropriate to talk about this comprehensive assault, using that kind of figurative language.

--Chris Mooney

The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week.

--Matt Wells (New Orleans crisis shames US)

Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before congress today... Take whatever idiot they have at the top, give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.

--Aaron Broussard (president of Jefferson Parish)

In passing, I have to ask if our President has seen fit to blame God for the thousands of dead innocents, the loss of property that made millions homeless, the displacement and separation of families, the destruction of fine buildings and the general damage to our way of life which took place and continues to take place despite his assurance that he'd prayed to God begged for mercy about the situation. One Reverend on TV thanked God for diverting Katrina slightly east so that New Orleans didn't receive it directly; what it did to Mississippi as a result of that divine response, wasn't mentioned. The governor of Louisiana declared a Day of Prayer, with no noticeable effect.

--James Randi (on his weekly newsletter, 02 Sept. 2005)

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

--Ramsey Clark

If you want someone or organization to prey on you, here's what you do: Don't think. Believe. Have some strong faith in something, anything. Let other people think for you. The quickest way, however, is just to become a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew.

--Ignots Pistachio

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?

--Mahatma Gandhi

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

--Kahlil Gibran

Those who choose to abstain from beliefs have great wisdom, for belief in even one false premise can lead to unimaginable disasters.

--Spatch Pentameter

The fundamental defect in the present state of democracy is the assumption that political and economic freedom can be achieved without first freeing the mind. Freedom of mind is not something that spontaneously happens. It is not achieved by the mere absence of obvious restraints. It is a product of constant, unremitting nurture of right habits of observation and reflection.

Until the taboos that hedge social topics from contact with thought are removed, scientific method and results in subjects far removed from social themes will make little impression upon the public mind. Prejudice, fervor of emotion, bunkum, opinion and irrelevant argument will weigh as heavily as fact and knowledge. Intellectual confusion will continue to encourage the men who are intolerant and who fake their beliefs in the interests of their feelings and fancies.

--John Dewey (Science, Belief, and the Public, 1924)

It occurs to me that the primary agenda of the powers that be is to induce FAITH. Faith means you are obligated to not think stuff through-- whatever they tell you not to think through.

--"Ben Mack" (Poker Without Cards)

You cannot reason with those to whom reason is a stranger, or with those driven by fear and ignorance.

--Steve Champeon

To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.

--Ludwig von Mises

Conservatives who hate liberalism should contemplate whether conservatism or liberalism would better the world. Fascists and Islamic terrorists are hard-line conservatives. Do you really think their conservative nature makes things better? Now imagine if they all became liberals. They would no longer harbor an ideology that promotes war. Science would progress. Education and medical care would dominate their concerns. They might even see the benefit of a government similar to the first secular government in the world: the Constitutional government as founded by American liberals.

--Pelican the Politician

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

--George Orwell

It's liberty for all, democracy's our style, unless you are against us, then it's prison without trial.

--Mick Jagger

I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

--Charles Darwin

To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of.... I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!

--Andr Breton (Surrealism and Painting, footnote, 1928)

You can't try to change the administration's course by appealing to facts and argument: they've rejected facts and argument, on principle... Most people seem not to understand that when we deal with the Bush administration, we are dealing with something unique, and uniquely dangerous: an administration which is fully committed to an ideology --an ideology that is entirely self-contained and completely self-referencing. It is not concerned with facts, evidence, logic and argument. It is concerned only with its own internal vision of the world, and how that world should be constructed and how it should operate.

--The Light Of Reason

Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying... The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a distinction, and a labor of Sisyphus to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge... [marks] the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.

--Theodor Adorno (Minima Moralia)

The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.

--Marcus Tullius Cicero

The First World War was wholly Christian in origin. The three emperors were devout and so were the more warlike of the British Cabinet.

--Bertrand Russell

In contrast to the ancient world, the unity of the Christian and Marxist world is astonishing. The two doctrines have in common a vision of the world which completely separates them from the Greek attitude. Jaspers defines this very well: "It is a Christian way of thinking to consider that the history of man is strictly unique."

--Albert Camus (The Rebel)

I will not swear on God. I will not swear on God, because I don't believe in the conceptual sense and in this nonsense. What I will swear on is my children and my grandchildren.

--Marlon Brando (refusing to recite a religious oath while testifying at his son Christian's trial, 1990. Source: Who's Who in Hell edited by Warren Allen Smith)

I note with interest that more and more commentators and columnists are getting around to asking questions about the basic rights that Americans are supposed to have about worshipping - or not worshipping - any of the hundreds of different varieties of deities that our species has invented to make the human condition more bearable and less confounding; having a "God did it" explanation to fall back on, allows us not to think about heavy matters. Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion, but that's getting increasingly difficult to achieve.

--James Randi (in his weekly online newsletter)

"Fundamentalism" might have been revived even if the Great War had not occurred. But it is reasonable to suppose that it would have not assumed such an intolerant and vituperative form, if so many educated men, in positions of leadership, had not deliberately cultivated resort to bitter intolerance and to coercive suppression of disliked opinions during the war... Until highly respectable and cultivated classes of men cease to suppose that in economic and political matters the importance of the end of social stability and security justifies the use of means other than those of reason, the intellectual habit of the public will continue to be corrupted at the root, and by those from whom enlightenment should be expected.

--John Dewey (Science, Belief, and the Public, 1924)

Now must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in god on the minds of children, producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off the ir belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.

--Charles Darwin

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be...surer of the noose than a private homicide.

--H. G. Wells

By analogy, imagine an archaeologist looking for the transition from the horse-drawn carriage to the automobile in a large lot where carriages and automobiles have been dumped for the past 150 years. On the bottom layer, he would find many carriages, and above, he would find many autos and auto parts starting with the first popular car - the Model-T Ford. But what are his chances of finding one of the first experimental cars that looked like a carriage with a motor attached - the automotive missing link?

--David W. Briggs (in response to creationists bleating about the lack of transitional life-forms in the fossil record)

Tis nobler to lose honor to save the lives of men than it is to gain honor by taking them.

--David Borenstein

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. 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 religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

--Albert Einstein

Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence!

--Immanuel Kant (What Is Enlightenment? 1784)

Divine ordination is a very dangerous idea, especially when combined with military power (the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, with military bases in a hundred different countries and warships on every sea). With God's approval, you need no human standard of morality. Anyone today who claims the support of God might be embarrassed to recall that the Nazi storm troopers had inscribed on their belts, "Gott mit uns" ("God with us").

--Howard Zinn (The Power and the Glory)

The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity.... Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.

--The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson (an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831)

Strange- we brought Clinton to Impeachment over a sexual indiscretion, but Bush can get away with everything- wars, treason, lies, and crimes against humanity- he never takes a licking, and just keeps on ticking.

--Eric Blumrich (BushFlash.com)

If you make peaceful change impossible... you make violent revolution inevitable.

--President John F. Kennedy

Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

--Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner (on the Ten Commandments ruling, June 27, 2005)

Every new & successful example of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters is of importance.

--James Madison (letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822)

War and religion; one cannot exist without the other.

--Pelican the Politician

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

--Will Durant (Story of Civilization, Vol IV: Ag e of Faith)

In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in god and in personal immortality.

--Clarence Darrow

So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity.

--Frank Zappa

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

--Sir R. F. Burton (Arabian Nights, vol. 10)

You don't have to give the Republicans Hell. All You have to do is tell the truth, and they'll think that it's Hell.

--Harry Truman

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

--Bertrand Russell

I'm a nonbeliever. I don't believe in the existence of a God. I don't believe in the Christian dogma. I find it horrifyingly silly. The intolerance that flows from organized religion is the most dangerous thing on the planet.

--Jane Rule (Brave Souls: Writers and Artists Wrestle with God, Love, Death and the Things that Matter, by Douglas Todd)

Not only is war a form of legalized murder, but it is mass serial killing. Take all the infamous serial killers throughout history (including Jack-the-Ripper, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer) and a single war makes them all look like rank amateurs. So if you support any offensive war, consider yourself just as culpable of murder as the most insane serial killer.

--Sarah Bellum

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

--Thomas Jefferson (letter to William Short, 28 July 1791)

There is only one religion that exists throughout all history, the belief in eternity. This belief is a deception.

--Albert Camus (The Rebel)

The creationists' fondness for "gaps" in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away.

--Richard Dawkins (Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant)

What you don't know isn't the problem; it's what you do 'know' that just isn't so.

--Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley)

In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

--George Orwell

Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways. There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else he's forgotten all about us.... How much reverence can you have for a Supreme being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation? What in the world was going through that warped, evil, scatological mind of his when he robbed old people of the ability to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? ... Why couldn't he have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of red-and-blue neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? ... What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power he had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess he made of it instead, his sheer incompetence is almost staggering.... Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like him as even a shipping clerk!

--Yossarian to Lt. Scheisskopf's wife (Catch 22, by Joseph Heller)

Senator [Coleman], in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right, and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives, 1600 of them American soldiers, sent to their deaths on a pack of lives, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies. If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, who's dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened, to President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens, you are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

--George Galloway (member of Briton's Parliament, in a US Senate hearing)

As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.

--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them.

--Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist monk)

My respect for the Abrahamic religions went up in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th. The last vestige of respect for the taboo disappeared as I watched the 'Day of Prayer' in Washington Cathedral, where people of mutually incompatible faiths united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place: religion. It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough!' Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.

--"Time to Stand Up" (written for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Sept. 2001)

We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes. The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon has endured the winnowing process of natural selection.

--Michael Shermer (Turn Me On, Dead Man)

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.

--Voltaire (from the Essay on Tolerance)

At the time of its Founding, the United States seemed to be an infertile ground for religion. Many of the nation's leaders - include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - were not Christians, did not accept the authority of the Bible, and were hostile to organized religion. The attitude of the general public was one of apathy: in 1776, only 5 percent of the population were participating members of churches.

--Ian Robertson (Sociology, 3rd edition)

Every man, who reasons, soon becomes and unbeliever.

--Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

--John Burroughs

'Believing' cannot tip the scales in making a historical judgement about whether something really happened. I can choose to believe that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, but my believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether or not he really did do it. So also with the story of Jesus walking on water: Believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether he really did do it. 'Belief' cannot be the basis for historical conclusions; it has no direct relevance.

--Marcus J. Borg ("Faith and Scholarship," August, 1993, BIble Review)

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

--Nathaniel Branden (Ph.D. Psychologist, author The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem)

All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.

--Henry Clay (Address, U.S. House of Representatives, March 24, 1818)

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

--Saul Bellow

Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.

--Richard Dawkins (Time to Stand Up)

Whenever religion is involved, terrorists kill more people.

--Dr. Bruce Hoffman (director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University, Scotland)

You mean you LIKE the thought that you've been created especially to worship your creator, and after you die you'll honor it throughout eternity? That's your purpose in existence--to be a cosmic cheering squad for a deity so vain and insecure that it needs constant reassurance that it's supreme? No thank you!

--Aviva (on alt.atheism)

One also has to understand that the legacy of the black church has hardly been progressive. While it did help blacks weather the storms of slavery and postslavery racism, it also hindered them from developing a modern outlook and keeps some of them locked in a religious provincialism (victimized by hucksters) allowing a patriarchal authoritarianism to take root along with a hostility to ideas and other means of self-assertion that wasn't even challenged until the civil rights era.

--Norman Kelley (The Head Negro In Charge Syndrome)

QUESTION: But, how does (fill in the blank) actually (work, do what you claim, etc.)?

ANSWER: It's so complex I can't explain it, you wouldn't understand.

REBUTTAL: That's not correct. If you won't explain it, I won't understand. But if you can't explain it, then you don't understand!

Q: Is anti-Semitism integral or incidental to Christianity?

PF: That's a heartbreaker. In modern middle-class America, is it intrinsic? No. But anti-Semitism has been integral to Christianity. When you think about it, the Holocaust was the greatest, most energetic, most spontaneous Christian ecumenical movement since the Crusades: Lithuanian Orthodox, German Lutherans, Catholic Frenchmen - everybody pitched in to kill Jewish civilians, children.

--Paula Fredriksen (historian of early Christianity in an interview)

It is the true believer's ability to "shut his eyes and stop his ears" to the facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacle nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence.

--Eric Hoffer, (The True Believer, response to Martin Luther's faithful shutting-out of contrary evidence, in Table Talk, Number 1687)

History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster... which illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social forces in place of empirical evidence...

--Paul Churchland (Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind)

I don't know. And I think that's a great way to end an interview. 'I don't know.' There's more that I don't know, than there is that I do know.

--Robert Anton Wilson (in an interview)

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

--Stephen W. Hawking (Der Spiegel, 1989)

A religious person is a dangerous person. He may not become a thief or a murderer, but he is liable to become a nuisance. He carries with him many foolish and harmful superstitions, and he is possessed with the notion that it is his duty to give these superstitions to others. That is what makes trouble. Nothing is so worthless as superstition....

--Marilla M. Ricker (Science Against Creeds," I Am Not Afraid Are You?")

Violence has come to be regarded by ever larger sectors of the population... as a legitimate instrument, indeed as the only instrument to change reality and achieve progress and development. This, to put it simply, is madness. A good part of this violence proceeds from a political fiction, from the idea that through a system and a body of ideas you can capture reality in its entirety and express it, organize it and reform it in a perfectly logical way. Every ideology leads ultimately to fanaticism, and fanaticism is fiction trying to impose itself on reality in the name of science.

--Mario Vargas Llosa (Fictions that Breed Violence)

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

--William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

--Alexis de Tocqueville

When you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion. The Catholic Church may espouse its opinion on abortion to the members of its congregation. But they are in violation of separation of church and state when they try to proselytize their abortion politics on people who are not Catholics.

--John Irving (interview in Mother Jones, May/June 1997)

The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies.

--Basil O'Connor

Technology disappeared and the Church became the most cohesive power in Western society. The extensive aqueduct and plumbing systems vanished. Orthodox Christians taught that all aspects of the flesh should be reviled and therefore discouraged washing as much as possible. Toilets and indoor plumbing disappeared. Disease became commonplace as sanitation and hygiene deteriorated. For hundreds of years, towns and villages were decimated by epidemics.

--Helen Ellerbe (The Dark Side of Christian History)

If we, who live outside asylums, act as if we lived in a fictitious world-- that is to say, if we are consistent with our beliefs-- we cannot adjust ourselves to actual conditions, and so fall into many avoidable semantic difficulties. But the so-called normal person practically never abides by his beliefs, and when his beliefs are building for him a fictitious world, he saves his neck by not abiding by them. A so-called "insane" person acts upon his beliefs, and so cannot adjust himself to a world which is quite different from his fancy.

--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)

It is pure illusion to think that an opinion which passes down from century to century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.

--Pierre Bayle (Thoughts on the Comet, 1682)

The clergy, no less than the capitalist class, lives on the backs of the people, profits from the degradation, the ignorance and the oppression of the people.

--Rosa Luxemburg (Socialism and the Churches,1905)

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

--Mark Twain ("Bible Teaching and Religious Practice," Europe and Elsewhere, 1923)

But we, wretched unbelievers, we bear our own burdens; we must say, 'I myself did it, I. Not God, not Satan; I myself!'

--Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm)

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

--Erich Fromm (Man for Himself, 1947)

The nearest I can make it out, 'Love your Enemies' means, 'Hate your Friends.'

--Benjamin Franklin

[I am] not just an atheist, but a total nonbeliever.

--David Cronenberg (interview in Esquire magazine, Feb. 1992)

Masochistic self-sacrifice is an integral part of most major organized religions... Orthodox religions deliberately instill guilt (self-damnation) in their adherents and then give these adherents guilt-soothing rituals to (temporarily) allay these kind of self-damning feelings.

--Dr. Albert Ellis (The Case Against Religiosity)

The Bible is not the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God; it is just a collection of contradictory, discrepant books that were written by superstitious ethnocentrics who thought that the hand of God was directing the destiny of the Hebrew people.

--Farrell Till (former minister and missionary for the Church of Christ)

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration -- courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

--H.L. Mencken

This I should consider as the nearest approach to a pure republic, which is practicable on a large scale of country or population. And we have examples of it in some of our States constitutions, which, if not poisoned by priest-craft, would prove its excellence over all mixtures with other elements; and, with only equal doses of poison, would still be the best.

--Thomas Jefferson (Letter to John Taylor, 28 May 1816)

The Religious-Right wants to keep deformed fetuses and vegetable state victims (the undead) alive while they approve of the killing of innocent women, children, and men in their "moral" wars, and thorough their cutting of social services. Their plan, taken to the extreme, would result in the earth filled with brainless, zombies. Hey wait a minute, I'm describing the mental condition of the Religious-Right!

--Bloatus the Obvious

We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn't been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake.

--Catherine Fahringer

'Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.'

--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)

The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason.

--Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard, 1758)

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

--Isaac Asimov

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 and leading by contrast.

--Mark Twain

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

--Isaac Asimov

We conjurors are never more amused than when we hear that canard, "Seeing is believing." We, above all others, know well that such a claim is not necessarily true...!

--James Randi (From Randi's Newsletter)

One of Bush Sr's numerious lies to the American people:

"I can tell you this: If I'm ever in a position to call the shots, I'm not going to rush to send somebody else's kids into a war."

--George H. W. Bush

President Bush said that the people who are attacking our forces in Iraq are getting more and more desperate because we're making so much progress. So just remember, the worse it gets, the better it is.

--Jay Leno

It is clearly not human nature that causes people to hurt one another. People of gentler cultures share the same human nature as we of Western civilization; it is our beliefs that differ.

--Helen Ellerbe (The Dark Side of Christian History)

Ideas that cannot be defended by reason and evidence can lead anywhere, and, if there is no warrant for one's belief, there is no telling where it will end.

--Paul M. Pfalzner, medical biology physicist

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind.

--Ayn Rand

The worst criminals are not half so immoral as the creators and perpetrators of the unquestionable hell of Christian theology.

--M.M. Mangasarian (Morality Without God, 1913)

Richard Nixon crossed the line when he began murdering foreigners in the name of "family values"- and George Bush crossed it when he sneaked into office and began killing brown skinned children in the name of Jesus and the American people.

--Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear)

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

--Mark Twain (Autobiography of Mark Twain)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

--H. L. Mencken

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

--William Kingdon Clifford

The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by some people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.

--Bertrand Russell

Is it even vaguely possible that some New Age Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make Richard Nixon look like a liberal?

--Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear)

The Church had devastating impact upon society. As the Church assumed leadership, activity in the fields of medicine, technology, science, education, history, art and commerce all but collapsed. Europe entered the Dark Ages.

--Helen Ellerbe (The Dark Side of Christian History)

If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost.

--Robert Ingersoll

Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

--Ludwig Feuerbach

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

--Noam Chomsky

We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

--Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man "Knowledge or Certainty")

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same public facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism -- with the support of the American people.

--Joe Conason

There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter our civil affairs, our government would soon be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed.

--Supreme Court of Wisconsin, Weiss vs. District Board, March 18, 1890

How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.

--Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man)

Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.

--Albert Einstein

Men become superstitious not because they had too much imagination, but because they were not aware that they had any.

--George Santayana

Facism is a religious concept.

--Benito Mussolini (Facism, Institutions And Doctrines)

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

--Robert A. Heinlein

The US military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.

--Senator Ted Kennedy

Devout deity-inspired religionists tend to sacrifice human love for godly love (agape) and to withdraw into monastic and holy affairs at the expense of intimate interpersonal relationships. They frequently are deficient in social competance. They spend immense amounts of time, effort, and money on establishments rather than on social welfare. They foment religious fights, feuds, wars, and terrorism...They encourage charity that is highly parochial and that is linked to god's glory more than to the alleviation of human suffering. Their altruism is highly alloyed with egotistically proving to god how great and glorious they can be as human benefactors.

--Dr. Albert Ellis (The Case Against Religiosity)

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

--Albert Einstein

I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.

--D. Dale Gulledge

Where is it written that if you don't like religion you are somehow disqualified from being a legitimate American? What was Mark Twain, a Russian? When did it become un-American to have opinions about the origin and meaning of the universe that come from sources other than the body of dogma of organizations approved by the federal government as certifiably Judeo-Christian? Is it American to believe that God ordered Tribe X to abjure port, or that he caused Leader Y to be born to a virgin, why is it suddenly un-American to doubt the prime mover of this unimaginably vast universe of quintillions of solar systems would likely be obsessed with questions involving the dietary and biosexual behavior of a few thousand bipeds inhabiting a small part of a speck of dust orbiting a third-rate star in an obscure spiral arm of one of millions of more or less identical galaxies?

--Hendrik Hertzberg

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

--Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man "Knowledge or Certainty")

The only thing that guarantees that (sufficiently complex) beliefs actually represent the world, are chains of evidence and argument linking them to the world. Only on matters of religious faith do sane men and women regularly dispute this fact.

--Sam Harris, Neuroscientist (responding to The Edge's 2005 question)

In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available... in America right now.

--Merle Haggard

PROPAGANDA: New Latin, first used in the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, an organization established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622.

1) The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.2) Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect.

Before the Christian dismisses atheism as irrational or condemns the atheist as immoral, he should consider the disturbing possibility that the God of Christianity is himself an atheist. And if this is true, it means that the Christian worships, obeys, and has devoted his life to an atheistic being who does not believe in any power superior to himself, never prays, is utterly without faith, and who does not acknowledge any authority, either cognitive or moral, external to himself.

Satan is not an atheist--that much is clear--for he believes in the God of Christianity. We thus have the intriguing spectacle of a battle between two titans, with God the Atheist on the side of good, and Satan the Theist on the side of evil. And if the Bible is to be believed, the Atheist will ultimately triumph over the Theist.

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.

Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

When the sacrifice of several generations has proved insufficient, we must then embark on an infinite period of universal strife one thousand times more destructive than before, then the conviction of faith is needed in order to accept the necessity of killing and dying. This new faith is no more founded on pure reason than were the ancient faiths.

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

--Robert Anton Wilson (Thought of the Month, 3.11.93 Jia Shen, Year of the Monkey)

To those who warn that it would be inhumane and wrong to leave Iraq soon, I ask: What's so humane about sticking around and killing again and again?

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.