<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.</em></p>
Pensées, section 14, appendix, polemical fragment 895
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">From the first moment I looked into that horror on September 11th, into that fireball, into that explosion of horror, I knew it. I recognized an old companion. I recognized religion.</em></p>
KQED, Frontline, Winter 2002
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">But only the ignorant or the malicious could claim that Christianity had not changed the world for the better. First of all the resolute assertion by Christians of belief in the one God, while showing complete loyalty to the state, finally overcame the absolutizing of political power and the divinization of the ruler. In the face of the collapse of morals in the great cities of the later period of the empire, the church indefatigably inculcated the elementary commandments of the Gods of Israel. Thus Christianity proved to be a moral power which deeply shaped society in the long process of transformation.</em></p>
The Catholic Church (2), pp. 29-30
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In the infancy of new religions, the wise and learned commonly esteem the matter too inconsiderable to deserve their attention or regard. And when afterwards they would willingly detect the cheat in order to undeceive the deluded multitude, the season is now past, and the records and witnesses, which might clear up the matter, have perished beyond recovery.</em></p>
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (10(97))
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Of this band of dupes [the biographers of Jesus], and imposters, Paul was the great Coryphaeus [leader of the chorus], and the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus. </em></p>
letter to William Short, April 13, 1820
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry an obvious but unsatisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence if its great Author. </em></p>
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1:15), pp. 415-416
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">… as long as their [pagan] adoration was successively prostituted to a thousand deities, it was scarcely possible that their hearts could be susceptible to a very sincere or lively passion for any one of them.</em></p>
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1:15), p. 459
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The man who says to me, “Believe as I do, or God will damn you,” will presently say, “Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.”</em></p>
“On Superstition” in Toleration and Other Essays
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asservations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational. </em></p>
The Natural History of Religion (15)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.</em></p>
Critique of “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” p. 127
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.</em></p>
Skinny Legs and All (1990)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity.</em></p>
The Anti-Christ (5), p. 27
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.</em></p>
Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals (39)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.</em></p>
speech given in Toronto, 1930
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. </em></p>
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (22:35), p. 168
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race … It would be impossible to imagine anything more un-Christian than theology. Christ probably couldn’t have understood it.</em></p>
Dialogues (22,36), pp. 143,247, recorded by Lucien Price, August 30, 1941 and January 19, 1945
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When the male of the species, enamored of his stargazing, set up a God outside this planet as arbiter of all events upon it, and repudiated nature, together with sex, for a promised dream of a future life, he turned his back on the creative life and inspiration that lay within himself and his partnership with woman.</em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 262
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If we are honest — and scientists have to be — we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination.</em></p>
remarks made during the Solvay International Conference (October 1927), as quoted by Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Beyond 1971
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain — then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system? </em></p>
in Job: a comedy of justice, and as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 145
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.</em></p>
Down at the Cross” in Fire Next Time, p. 45
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">“Being Christian” is no longer defined by doing good deeds [but] by an arrogant mission to tell others how they must live—who they can marry, who they can adopt, what they must teach in schools.</em></p>
Huffington Post, Internet blog, “Bush’s Trojan Christ,” May 25, 2011
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural.</em></p>
I Asimov: A Memoir (chapter 5), p. 13
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Looking back at the worst of times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.</em></p>
The Meaning of it All
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you, and you can go on with your life. It wasn’t until the beginning of “Star Trek” that the subject of religion arose again. What brought it up was that people were saying that I would have to have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, “No, we don’t.”</em></p>
The Humanist, March/April 1991, p. 6
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I think you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche if mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form.</em></p>
speech given in San Francisco, CA, September 15, 2003
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.</em></p>
Do What you Will, “One and Many,” p. 3
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is amazing how childishly gullible humans are. There are, for example, so many different religions – each claiming to have the truth, each saying that their truths are clearly superior to the truths of others — how can someone possibly take them seriously.</em></p>
“God, Science, and Delusion: a chat with Arthur C. Clarke,” Free Inquiry 19, No 2, Spring 1999
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming on the clouds of heaven. Thus the center of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to the future life … A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism; for civilization is only possible through the active cooperation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years.</em></p>
The Golden Bough, pp. 362-363
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">But for day-in, day-out lifelong bracing, there is probably nothing so effective as religion: it makes powerful and talented people more humble and patient, it makes average people rise above themselves, it provides sturdy support for many people who desperately need help staying away from drink or drugs or crime. People who would otherwise be self-absorbed or shallow or crude or simply quitters are often ennobled by their religion, given a perspective on life that helps them make the hard decisions that we all would be proud to make.</em></p>
Breaking the Spell (3), p. 55
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Science is reductionistic in that it tries to explain the unknown in terms of the known. Contrariwise, religious explanation frequently explains the unknown in terms of the even less known.</em></p>
as quoted by Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 332
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works. </em></p>
in an ABC interview with Diane Sawyer, June 7, 2010
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it is still wanting to be tried.</em></p>
Love of Enemies: the way to peace, p. 88
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.</em></p>
The Kingdom of God is Within You
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Religion Poisons Everything</em></p>
subtitle of book, God is Not Great
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If all unbelievers are to be damned for eternity it becomes the moral duty of Literalist Christians to spread their beliefs, by force if necessary.</em></p>
The Jesus Mysteries
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The great superstition in modern times is focused on the role given to chance in human affairs. Chance is the new reigning deity of the modern mind. Chance inhabits the castle of the gods. Chance is given credit for the creation of the universe and the emergence of the human race from the slime. Chance is a shibboleth. It is a magic word we use to explain the unknown. It is the favorite power of causality for those who will attribute power to anything or anyone but God … To say that something has happened by chance is to say that it is a coincidence. This is simply a confession that we cannot perceive all the forces and casual powers that are at work in an event … Chance really explains nothing. It is merely a word we use as a shorthand for our ignorance. </em></p>
Chosen by God, pp. 191-194
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Christianity cannot erase man’s need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however … is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure.</em></p>
Atheism: the case against God, p. 308
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A doctor or pharmacist practicing medicine or dispensing drugs in our time based on either the writings of Aristotle or the formulas of an ancient medicine man would be laughed at first, and then if this activity were not stopped immediately, they would be accused of malpractice, removed from their professions and even imprisoned … </em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 284
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster. </em></p>
Civil Disobedience (part 2, paragraph 12)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I don’t want to see any religious people in public office because they’re working for another boss.</em></p>
Playboy interview, May 2, 1993
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">ll religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.</em></p>
(attributed to) as quoted in Haught, 2000 years of Disbelief, p. 188
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If a woman opens a consulting firm on Bond Street, and sits there in strange robes professing to tell the future by cards or crystals or revelations made to her by spirits, she is prosecuted as a criminal for imposture. But of a man puts on strange robes and opens a church in which he professes to absolve us from the guilt of our misdeeds, to hold the keys of heaven and hell … to alleviate the lost of souls in purgatory, to speak with the voice of God, and to dictate what is sin and what is not to all the world, the police treat him with great respect; and nobody dreams of prosecuting him as an outrageous imposter.</em></p>
as quoted in Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief, p. 217
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