Quotes & Sayings About Atheist

In theater or movies you see either 'I'm religious' or 'I'm an atheist.' I've never seen too much discussion of 'I believe there's a higher power but I'm hesitant to reach out to him because I don't know if I'm worthy of his attention.' — Zach Braff

I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same fifty percent rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't ... Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe ... same as the voodoo lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles. It's all the same ... so just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself ... — George Carlin

When I deeply look at a pious, I see no affection but fear; and when I look at an atheist, I see no fear but conceit! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist. — C.S. Lewis

If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted. — A.J. Ayer

Why should an atheist pay more taxes so that a church which he despises should pay no taxes? That's a fair question. How can the apologists for the church exemption answer it? — E. Haldeman-Julius

I was told that The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist. — Bertrand Russell

I don't see why Christians should censor themselves out of any forum in which our perspectives can be heard. I disagree with the theology of many groups that I address; Jews, for example, who do not accept Jesus, or atheists. — Gary Bauer

I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [his grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American. — Newt Gingrich

I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.
... And supposedly 95% of Americans say they believe in God - that's worrying.
... Religions are Trojan horses which conceal profoundly strange psychopathy strains. There's no other explanation for them. The sheer fear of death has been the main engine of religions for a very long time. — J.G. Ballard

The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for everything else. — Milton Steinberg

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? — John Updike

A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong. — Michel Faber

I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist. — Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong. — Christopher Hitchens

We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics. — Stephen Hawking

[People of faith must] reassure them [atheists] that we share with them the core values of America, that our faith is not inconsistent with their freedom and our mission is not one of intolerance, but one of love ... I stand before you today as a witness to the goodness of God. For me, like you and like my running mate Al Gore, faith provided a foundation, order and purpose in my life. — Joe Lieberman

Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in. — Richard Dawkins

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher. — Lucretius

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. — Primo Levi

In women he doesn't trust! He is an atheist. — Ljupka Cvetanova

If you want to turn out an atheist child, unconditional love constantly is a good way to do it. — Penn Jillette

Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists. — Richard Dawkins

It does not matter whether you are a theist or atheist, what matters is sincerity, forgiveness, and compassion. — Dalai Lama

The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all of his perfection, creating imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell. — Armand Salacrou

In His boundless love God permits the atheist to live. — Mahatma Gandhi

The real heretic is not the atheist or agnostic (who are often decent people) but those who murmur "it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as it makes you feel good." This turns religion into a subjective matter, like taste in furnishings, and robs theology of its claim to ultimate truth. — Sydney J. Harris

Atheist Jews double crossers stole our [black people's] secrets ... They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves ... Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab's head. — Amiri Baraka

For an atheist you will be always considered as a human no matter what, but for a religious if you don't belong with them, you are always an infidel. — M.F. Moonzajer

All religions are pieced together out of elements which seem so at odds with reason that any intelligence laughs at them. — Pierre Charron

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. — Sam Harris

In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple ... Somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time ... I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion. — Richard P. Feynman

The antitheist is quick to excoriate all religious belief by generically laying the blame at the door of all who claim to be religious, without distinction. By the same measure, why is there not an equal enthusiasm to distribute blame for violence engendered by some of the irreligious? — Ravi Zacharias

I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith. — Andrew Schneider

I would be unelectable. I'm an atheist. As we all know, that is something people won't accept. — Ron Reagan

I whispered, under my breath, an atheist's prayer ... whatever the hell that is. — William Jiang

The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. — George Bernard Shaw

I've never known a tranquil atheist. Don't they always look like they just sat on a tack? — Vicki Covington

If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them. — Mark Haddon

Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing. — John Dewey

they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That's why atheist humanism - the basis of any 'pluralist society' - is doomed. — Michel Houellebecq

Properly a theory about knowledge, not about religion. A theist and a Christian may be an agnostic; an atheist may not be an agnostic. An atheist may deny that there is God, and in this case his atheism is dogmatic and not agnostic. Or he may refuse to acknowledge that there is a God simply on the ground that he perceives no evidence for his existence and finds the arguments which have been advanced in proof of it invalid. In this case his atheism is critical, not agnostic. The atheist may be, and not infrequently is, an agnostic. — Robert Flint

[Taken from a BBC documentary]
Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents. — Tariq Ali

For more than a year, he'd felt destined to marry Isabel Arundell; now, suddenly, he wasn't so sure. He loved her, that was certain, but he also resented her. He loved her strength and practicality but resented her overbearing personality and tendency to do things on his behalf without consulting him first; loved that she tolerated his interest in all things exotic and erotic but hated her blinkered Catholicism. Charles Darwin had killed God but she and her family, like so many others, still clung to the delusion. — Mark Hodder

The last Christian died on a cross. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There are those, of course, who deny that they need any form of authority. They are the popular atheists and agnostics. Such men say that they must be shown by 'reason' whatever they are to accept as true. But the great thinkers among non-Christian men have taken no such position. They know that they cannot cover the whole area of reality with their knowledge. — Cornelius Van Til

A dominant misconception among believers is that their atheist brethren are a slavering pack of hell-bound debauchees, gleefully wining and wenching their way through life while loudly professing their amorality. — Lynn Coady

A Buddhist or a good atheist is as acceptable to God as a good Catholic. — Pat Buckley

An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson. — Alain De Botton

But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people! The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at. — Terry Pratchett

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless. — Sean S. Kamali

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is nothing like being told to go fuck yourself by the same person who was, only days before, praying on your behalf. — Henry Rollins

Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did. — M.R. Carey

As everybody knows, being raised Catholic with half a brain means becoming an atheist. — Maria Semple

An atheist is a man who does not believe the existence of a God; now, no one can be certain of the existence of a being whom he does not conceive, and who is said to unite incompatible qualities. — Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. As for other practical opinions, though not absolutely free from all error, if they do not tend to establish domination over others, or civil impunity to the Church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated. — John Locke

I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself. — Christopher Hitchens

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. — Charles Darwin

The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble. — Carl Sagan

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

An Atheist in Alabama is one that doesn't believe in Bear Bryant. — Wally Butts

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

Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts. — Peter Kreeft

You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist. — Studs Terkel

If you don't think you're close-minded for not believing in Zeus, then please don't accuse atheists of being close-minded for not believing in your god. — Greta Christina

Everyday is an atheist holiday. — Penn Jillette

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. — Richard Dawkins

We have been created as recipients. I look at the stars, at the grass, at my fat-faced children, at my fingernails, and I am oppressed by gratitude
I have been given a belly so that I might hunger. I have been given hunger so that I might be fed.
I look in the atheist's mirror. I look at his faith in the nonexistence of meaning. I look at his preaching and painting. I see nothing but a shit-storm.
Why would I walk through that door? Why would I live in your novel? — N.D. Wilson

One of the things that made me suffer no regret when I was called away from the cramped intellectual jail of atheism into a wider and more wonderful world, was my growing conviction that my fellow atheists were shallow, men without insight into real human nature. — John C. Wright

Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution? — Richard Dawkins

The aim of this book is not to make atheism a popular belief or even to overcome its invisibility. My object is not utopian. It is merely to provide good reasons for being an atheist. ... My object is to show that atheism is a rational position and that belief in God is not. I am quite aware that atheistic beliefs are not always based on reason. My claim is that they should be. — Michael Martin

I will insist the Hebrews have [contributed] more to civilize men than any other nation. If I was an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations ... They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews. They have given religion to three-quarters of the globe and have influenced the affairs of mankind more and more happily than any other nation, ancient or modern. — John Adams

I was reading all these books, including the Bible - and I'm an atheist. — Margot Kidder

[When asked what he wants for his tombstone epitaph]
Since I'm an atheist, and have no belief whatsoever in life after death, I couldn't care less
it's not like it'll have any impact on me, since by definition I will be completely extinguished. I guess if someone twisted my arm and forced me to provide an epitaph, it would be 'Don't forget.' Sound advice ... — Richard Bartle

Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker. — Christopher Hitchens

The spirit of the times can haunt even the atheists. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Religious liberty in a nation is as real as the liberty of its least popular religious minority. Look not to the size of cathedrals or even to the words on the statute books for proof of the reality of religious freedom. Ask what is the fate of the Protestant in Spain, the Jew in Saudi Arabia, the Arab in Israel, the Catholic in Poland or the atheist in the United States. — Paul Blanshard

I was just thinking, if it is really religion with these nudist colonies, they sure must turn atheists in the wintertime. — Will Rogers

Thank God in an atheist. — Mal Peet

Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful.

Samuel wrote to Joe, sayings, "I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you'd take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven't even got a shovel yet. — John Steinbeck

I am like all other atheists only in that I do not believe there are any gods. Beyond that, I may differ dramatically in my values and beliefs from any other atheist. On both sides of the political spectrum, one can find the neo-conservative Objectivists and the ultra-liberal Communists, both of whom hate each other. These two factions take up nearly opposite sets of values, yet both are comprised of unabashed atheists. — Richard Carrier

The claim of fine tuning is subjective. As I stated before, no measurement in physics is perfect. The amount of precision we demand can be increased or decreased at our whim. We could have an approximate measurement that has a huge margin of error and call it finely-tuned if we so desire. Theists, in particular, have a lot of such desire. They so badly want God to be an indispensable part of our universe's creation, so they see finely-tuned constants.
They also tend to sweep under the rug the following fact: the vast majority of our universe is hostile to life, and they fail to consider that another hand in the proverbial deck might yield a better universe than ours, one teaming with life on every planet throughout the cosmos. — G.M. Jackson

The claim 'God does not exist' is just as much a claim to know something as saying 'God does exist,' meaning the atheist needs just as much substantiation for his claim as the theist does for his. — Scott Klusendorf

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. — Carl Sagan

Atheist n. A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others. — Chaz Bufe

Let's drop the whole 'atheist evangelism' thing and call out bullshit questions like 'what does atheism have to offer?' for just what they are: Bullshit. I mean, what does knowing that the Earth goes around the Sun have to offer? Who cares? It just is. — Rebecca Watson

In the religion of Love the courtesan is a heretic; but the nun is an atheist. — Richard B. Garnett

We (atheists) act in good conscience because we believe in moral principles, not because we expect a reward in Heaven. — Margherita Hack

We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God. — Don Henley

The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind. — Thomas Paine

A life based on [religious] faith is a life based on pure speculation, and speculation is, by its very definition, unsound. — Michael Vito Tosto

When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex. After I dropped off the hitchhikers," Franz continues," I turned my van around, drove back to the store, and bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn't used to drinking, so it made me real sick. Hoped it'd kill me, but it didn't. Just made me real, real sick. — Jon Krakauer

Many Christians, including BioLogos, like to throw out the "you can't take the Bible literally" argument. They think it is the ultimate zinger that will end any debate in their favor. But if we shouldn't take the Bible literally, why should we believe God is real in the literal sense? Perhaps God is a metaphor also. Maybe God is really a metaphor for nature or chance. Heaven forbid! However, BioLogos insists on having it both ways: God is literally true but the Bible is not. That's like saying Mother Goose is literally true but her nursery rhymes are not. — G.M. Jackson

American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America. — Stanley Hauerwas

By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none. — Charlie Chaplin

I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs. — Simon Hoggart

I don't believe in God, I only believe in Al Pacino, and that's the truth. — Javier Bardem