Atheism quotes
2.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside atheism — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away its ordure. This function is performed by persons, relationships, professions, the fatherland, the world, or finally, for the really arrogant - I mean our modern pessimists - by the Good God himself."
"Fundamentalists of different religions have more in common with each other than they do with the moderates of their own religions."
"Ignorance is not not knowin' - Ignorance is knowin' what ain't so."
"The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was."
"Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar."
"Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag."
"Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty - to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it."
"This is the only sane clerical the earthquake has exposed to view yet."
"You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient 'people say.'"
"Christ preaches only servitude and dependence... True Christians are made to be slaves."
"The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it."
"I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits... Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum."
"I am flatly opposed to appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican. Whatever advantages it might have in Rome - and I'm not convinced of these - they would be more than offset by the divisive effect at home."
"The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate."
"The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them."
"It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable."
"Belief, thus, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong."
"The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind."
"Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence is always presented to us as an injunction of religion."
"The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded."
